Reframing War: British Military Painting 1854 to 1918.

Two Volumes

Volume 1 of 2

Dorothy Nott

PhD

University of York

History of Art

April 2015

2

ABSTRACT

In this thesis I argue for a reassessment of the place within art

historical research of a neglected cohort of late-Victorian battle

artists who continued to paint military scenes into the second decade

of the twentieth century. I chart the move towards a graphic

representation of the rank and file in the art of Elizabeth Butler

(1846-1933) which served to alert the public and the art world to the

brutal effects of war on the individual soldier and how this move

impacted on her fellow late-Victorian, and now little-known, battle

artists such as Ernest Crofts (1847-1911), John Charlton (1849-

1917), Richard Caton Woodville (1856-1927), William Barnes

Wollen (1857-1936), and Godfrey Douglas Giles (1857-1941). I

examine their visual representations of a growing awareness of the

actual consequences of war on the ordinary soldier, and look at the

effects on their art of an increasing imperialistic outlook at the end of

the nineteenth century, and especially during the Second Boer War

(1899-1902), within the context of an expanding media,

technological developments, photography and changes in uniform. A

particular focus is the effect on their art of the change from scarlet to

khaki in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

A primary concern of this thesis is the exploration of the

“modernity” of late nineteenth-century British battle painting and the

relationship of selected works by these artists to that elusive and ill-

defined term, modernism. It is within this context that I explore the

reception of these artists and their works by contemporary audiences

alongside their transition into the twentieth century. The reasons for

their declining popularity and complete omission from the official

war artist schemes of the First World War are examined together

with their legacy into the twenty-first century.

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LIST OF CONTENTS

Page Number

VOLUME 1

ABSTRACT 2

LIST OF CONTENTS 3

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 6

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 13

AUTHOR’S DECLARATION 14

INTRODUCTION 15

CHAPTER ONE THE CHANGING FACE OF BATTLE: ELIZABETH BUTLER’S MILITARY PAINTING 31

Visualising Humanity 36

Visualising Soldiers 43

The Spectacle of War 52

The Pathos of War 61

CHAPTER TWO THE ‘BOHEMIAN WITH A BRUSH’ RICHARD CATON WOODVILLE AND HIS CONTEMPORIES 79

Imperial Representations 86

Muscular Christianity 106

The Pleasure Culture of War 109

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Press and Propaganda 117

The Pro-Boers 122

CHAPTER THREE RELINQUISHING SCARLET 130

Gentlemen in Khaki: “A Richer Dust” 133

Photography 147 CHAPTER FOUR EXHIBITING WAR; EXHIBITING HISTORY 159

A Challenging Transition 163

Exhibiting War 168

Exhibiting History 192

Contemporary History Paintings and Public Entertainment 206

CHAPTER FIVE “MANDARISM” VERSUS MODERNISM 213

The “Alleged Miracle” of World War One Official War Artist Schemes 215

Butler and the Politics of Inclusion 225

Sargent’s “Gassed” 228

CONCLUSION 240

A Question of Legacy 240

Those Neglected Works 254

ABBREVIATIONS 258

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 260

Newspapers and Periodicals 260

Unpublished Sources 261

Published Sources 262 VOLUME 2 LIST OF CONTENTS 330

ILLUSTRATIONS 331

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 Butler, Elizabeth, Missing (1873), dimensions unknown,

(original, oil on canvas), whereabouts unknown; image from photograph provided by Viscount Gormanston for the exhibition, Lady Butler, Battle Artist 1846-1933 at the National Army Museum, 1987.

Figure 2 Meissonier, Jean-Louis Ernest, 1814: Campagne de France (1864), 51.5 x 76.5, oil on wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, accession no: 94DE58708/RF1862. Figure 3 Barker, Thomas Jones, The Charger of Captain Nolan Bearing Back his Master to the British Lines (1855), 43 x 53.5, oil on board, National Gallery of Dublin, accession no: NGI 1965. Figure 4 Butler, Elizabeth, Image from Sketchbook (1862), National Army Museum, London, accession no: 6310- 353-2. Figure 5 Butler, Elizabeth, Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea (1874), 91 x 182.9, oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust/©HM Queen Elizabeth II, accession no: RCIN 405915. Figure 6 Butler, Elizabeth, Balaclava (1876), 103.4 x 187.5, oil on canvas, Manchester City Art Gallery, accession no: 1898.13. Figure 7 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, Field of Waterloo (1818), 147.3 x 238.8, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N00500. Figure 8 Woodville, Richard Caton, Saving the Guns at Maiwand (1882), 133 x 199, oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no: WAG 140. Figure 9 Woodville, Richard Caton, The Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman (1898), 153.4 x 245.8, oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no: WAG 152. Figure 10 Butler, Elizabeth, Dawn of Waterloo. The “Réveille” in the Bivouac of the Scots Greys on the Morning of the Battle (1893-95), 126.4 x 196.3, Falkland Palace, Fifeshire. Figure 11 Butler, Elizabeth, detail of Dawn at Waterloo.

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Figure 12 Butler, Elizabeth, detail of Dawn of Waterloo. Figure 13 Butler, Elizabeth, Evicted (1890), 236 x 177.8, oil on canvas, Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, accession no: D132.10.00001. Figure 14 Butler, Elizabeth, The Defence of Rorke’s Drift (1880), 120.2 x 214, oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust/©HM Queen Elizabeth II, accession no: RCIN 405897. Figure 15 Paton, Joseph Noel, Home (The Return from the Crimea) (1855-56 and 1859), 94 x 79, oil on panel, Royal Collection Trust/©HM Queen Elizabeth II, accession no: RCIN 406954. Figure 16 Barker, Thomas Jones, The Allied Generals with their Officers of their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol (1856), 64.2 x 141, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 17 Luard, John D’Albiac, A Welcome Arrival (1857), 75.5 x 100.9, oil on canvas, National Army Museum, London, accession no: 1958-08-18-1. Figure 18 Simpson, William, Commissariat Difficulties (1855), from Seat of the War in the East, 27 x 42, lithograph, National Army Museum, London, accession no: NAM. 1971-02-33-490-13, image 142111. Figure 19 Simpson, William, Summer in the Crimea (1857), 24.9 x 35.4, watercolour over pencil, the British Museum, London, accession no: 1971,0515.10. Figure 20 Paton, Joseph Noel, The Commander-in-Chief, Crimea (1855), 33.7 x 45.7, pen and ink, private collection. Figure 21 Brown, Ford Madox, Work (1852-65), 137 x 197.3, oil on canvas, Manchester City Art Gallery, accession no: 1885.1. Figure 22 Leech, John, Grand Military Spectacle: The Heroes of the Crimea Inspecting the Field Marshals (1855), wood engraving, Punch xxix, 179-3, November 1855. Figure 23 Fenton, Roger, Hardships in Camp (1855), wet collodion print, Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas.

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Figure 24 Fenton, Roger, Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855), wet collodion print, Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas. Figure 25 Pott, Laslett John, On the March from Moscow (1873), 80 x 119.5, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 26 Fildes, Samuel Luke, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874), 142.3 x 247.7, oil on canvas, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, accession no: THC 0021. Figure 27 Butler, Elizabeth, detail of Balaclava. Figure 28 Sargent, John Singer, Gassed (1919), 231 x 611.1, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London, accession no: IWM ART 1460. Figure 29 Butler, Elizabeth, detail of Balaclava. Figure 30 Butler, Elizabeth, detail of Balaclava. Figure 31 Butler, Elizabeth, detail of Balaclava. Figure 32 Kennington, Eric, The Kensingtons at Laventie (1915), 139.7 x 152.4, oil on glass, Imperial War Museum, London, accession no: IWM ART 15661. Figure 33 Woodville, Richard Caton, All That Was Left of Them (1902), 66 x 99, oil on canvas, Queens Own Lancers, Thoresby, Nottinghamshire, accession no: 17.28. Figure 34 Butler, Elizabeth, The Remnants of an Army, Jellalabad, January 13th1842 (1879), 132 x 234, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N01553. Figure 35 Woodville, Richard Caton, The Next Moment I Felt Myself Soaring Skyward (1923), 13.3 x 22.5, watercolour, Treasure House, Beverley on loan from Burnby Hall, Pocklington, East Yorkshire, accession no: DDBU/1/5/32. Figure 36 Woodville, Richard Caton, Gentleman in Khaki (1899), statue in bronze, taken from the illustration to accompany The Absent-minded Beggar by Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Sullivan. Various venues. Figure 37 Butler, Elizabeth, The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras (1875), 97.2 x 216.2, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, accession no: P-309.9-1.

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Figure 38 Woodville, Richard Caton, Cronje Surrenders to Lord Roberts at Paardeberg, wood engraving, Illustrated London News, 31 March 1900. Figure 39 Woodville, Richard Caton, Their Ordeal by Fire: the Grenadier Guards at the Battle of Biddulphs Berg, wood engraving, Illustrated London News, 28 July 1900. Figure 40 Woodville, Richard Caton, The Night Charge of the 19th Hussars near Lydenberg on November 7th 1900, wood engraving, Illustrated London News, 15 December 1900. Figure 41 Woodville, Richard Caton, The Relief of the Light Brigade, 25 October 1854 (1897), 76.2 x 114.3, oil on canvas, National Army Museum, London, accession no: 1989-01-1-1. Figure 42 Woodville, Richard Caton, The Dangers of Mercy: Indian Ambulance-Bearers under Fire, wood engraving, Illustrated London News, 9 June 1900. Figure 43 Giles, Godfrey Douglas, The Race for the Kopje (1902), 106.7 x 162.5, oil on canvas, Horsepower: the Museum of the Kings Royal Hussars, Winchester, accession no. 613. Figure 44 Bacon, John Henry Frederick, The Relief of Ladysmith (1900) 76 x 114, oil on canvas. National Army Museum, accession no: NAM 1996-04-1-1. Figure 45 Penny, Edward, The Marquis of Granby Relieving a Sick Soldier (1765), 101 x 127, oil on canvas, National Army Museum, London, accession no: 1963-07-31-1. Figure 46 Barker, Thomas Jones, The Relief of Lucknow (1859), 105.4 x 181.3, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London, accession no: NPG 5851. Figure 47 Joy, George William, General Gordon’s Last Stand (1893), 236 x 175, oil on canvas, Leeds City Art Gallery, accession no: LEEAG.PA.1920.0274. Figure 48 Butler, Elizabeth, Scotland Forever! (1881) 101.5 x 193, oil on canvas. Leeds City Art Gallery, accession no: LEEAG.PA1888.0002.

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Figure 49 Anon, With our Bobs to Pretoria, postcard, copyright, ©The British Library Board, 1865 c. 2. Figure 50 Charlton, John, Routed: Boers Retreating (1900), 151.1 x 240, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 51 Woodville, Richard Caton, Burning the Farm of a Treacherous Burgher, wood engraving, reproduced under the title, A Painful Duty in Wilson, H.W. With Flag to Pretoria, vol. 2, 1901: 582. Figure 52 Butler, Elizabeth, Within Sound of the Guns (1903), 66.7 x 87, oil on canvas, Army Staff College, Shrivenham, Wiltshire, accession no: 20520. Figure 53 Butler, Elizabeth, Yeomanry Scouts on the Veldt (1903), 99.7 x 138.7, oil on canvas, Downside Abbey, Somerset. Figure 54 Woodville, Richard Caton, detail of The Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman. Figure 55 Sargent, John Singer, Colonel Ian Hamilton, CB, DSO (1898) 138.4 x 78.7, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N05246. Figure 56 Stone, Marcus, The Soldier’s Return (1900), 102 x 135, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 57 Shaw, John Liston Byam, The Boer War, 101.8 x 76, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, accession no: 1928 P204. Figure 58 Anon, Spion Kop, (1900), Emmanuel Lee Collection, National Media Museum, Bradford, accession no: 2012- 5040. Figure 59 Anon, Boer Internee, undated, Emmanuel Lee Collection, National Media Museum, Bradford, accession no: 2012-5040. Figure 60 Charlton, John, French Artillery Crossing the Flooded Aisne (1915), 112 x 183.5, oil on canvas, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, accession no: TWCMS: C10000. Figure 61 Lund, Neils Möller, The Corporation of London.

The Heart of the Empire (1904), 137 x 183, oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London, accession no: 11092.

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Figure 62 Butler, Elizabeth, Rescue of Wounded, Afghanistan (1905), 80 x 152.5, oil on canvas, Army Staff College, Shrivenham, Wiltshire, accession no: 20511. Figure 63 Butler, Elizabeth, On the Morning of Waterloo. The Cuirassiers’ Last Réveil, (1914), 106.5 x 142, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 64 Butler, Elizabeth, The London Irish at Loos (1916), 30.5 x 25.5, watercolour, Irish Rifles Regimental Museum, Camberwell, London, uncatalogued. Figure 65 Butler, Elizabeth, Eyes Right (1916), 41 x 58, watercolour over pencil, private collection. Figure 66 Butler, Elizabeth, In the Retreat from Mons: the Royal Horse Guards (1927), 61 x 96.5, oil on canvas, Royal Hospital, Chelsea, London, accession no: 502. Figure 67 Woodville, Richard Caton, General Wolfe Climbing the Heights of Abraham on the Morning of the Battle of Quebec (1906), 43.2 x 68.6 (supported), watercolour and pencil heightened with white, Tate Britain, London, accession no: NO5203. Figure 68 Woodville, Richard Caton, Poniatowski’s Last Charge at Leipzig (1912), 35.5 x 25, oil on panel, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N05205. Figure 69 Woodville, Richard Caton, Napoleon Crossing the Bridge to Lobau Island (1912), 35.5 x 25, oil on panel, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N05202. Figure 70 Woodville, Richard Caton, Marshal Ney at the Battle of Eylau (1913), 35.5 x 25, oil on panel, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N05204. Figure 71 Anon, The Making of the ‘Illustrated London News’. How the Paper is Produced Each Week, photograph, Illustrated London News, 2 September 1911. Figure 72 Crofts, Ernest, Roundhead Patrol (1905), 91.4 x 71, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 73 Crofts, Ernest, The Surrender of the City of York to the Roundheads (1908), 213.3 x 129.5, oil on canvas, private collection. Figure 74 Abbey, Edwin Austin, The Play Scene in Hamlet (1897),

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155.6 x 245.1, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery, Hartford, Connecticut, accession no: 1937.2171. Figure 75 Abbey, Edwin Austin, The Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1901), engraving, Harvard College Library, Hollis No: 002847136. Figure 76 Sargent, John Singer, Sir Frank Swettenham (1904), 258 x 142.5, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London, accession no: NPG 4837. Figure 77 Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne, La Mitrailleuse (1915), 61 x 50.8, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London, accession no: N03177. Figure 78 Mudie-Cooke, Olive, Burnt-Out Tank (1917), 23.8 x 31.1, watercolour, Imperial War Museum, London, accession no: no: IWM ART 5398. Figure 79 Spencer, Stanley, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station, Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919), 182.8 x 218.4, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London, accession no: IWM ART 2268. Figure 80 Woodville, Richard Caton, Return to Mons (1919), 101 x 153, oil on canvas, Officers Mess, Queens Own Lancers, Catterick, accession no: R452 5L. Figure 81 Brueghel the Elder, Pieter, Der Blinden (1568), 84 x 154, tempera on canvas, National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, accession no: Q 1. Figure 82 Sargent, John Singer, A Crashed Airplane (1918), 34.2 x 53.3, watercolour, Imperial War Museum, London, accession no: IWM ART 001610. Figure 83 Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne, Harvest of Battle (1919), 182.8 x 317.5, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London, accession no: IWM ART 1921. Figure 84 Wollen, William Barnes, The Last Stand of the 44th at Gundamuck,1842 (1898), 68 x 124, oil on canvas, Essex Regimental Museum, Chelmsford, Essex, accession no: ER11094. Figure 85 Pemble, John, As its Bicentenary Approaches, a Bloody Battle and its Consequences are Newly Appraised, the Guardian, 29 November 2014: 9.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to so many people in the course of my research for this

thesis, starting with the staff and students of the History of Art

Department in the University of York. In particular I should like to

thank my supervisor, Dr Sarah Victoria Turner (now at the Paul

Mellon Centre in London), who has been encouraging, enthusiastic

and supportive throughout, in spite of the distance between London

and York. I am grateful too to Professor Jason Edwards, my internal

supervisor who has kept his word to ensure that I was fully supported

by the department following Dr Turner’s departure, and to Dr

Richard Johns who joined my TAP panel.

I have benefited from generous travel funding from the Paul Mellon

and from the department which has helped enormously in my

journeys to all those diverse and far-flung regimental museums and

other venues from Sussex, to Falkland Palace. I am enormously

grateful to the staff of many institutions and private homes, in

particular, the National Army Museum (especially Pip Dodd),

Oliver Hawkins at Humphrey’s Homestead at Greatham, Sussex,

Downside Abbey, Falkland Palace, the Royal Collection, the Royal

Academy, Beverley Treasure House, British Library Boston Spa,

Tate Britain, the Walker, Leeds City, Manchester City, Bury and

Ferens Art Galleries, the Army Staff College, The Queens Own

Lancers and the Museum of the Irish Rifles in Camberwell, all of

whom have welcomed my endless enquiries and dealt with them

with generosity, good humour and common sense. I am also

grateful to Paul Bennett who advised me on army structure and to

my patient friend Joe Callan for helping me find my way around

my laptop.

I should like to dedicate this thesis to the memory of my late

husband, Bert Watson, himself an alumnus of the University of

York, and with whom I shared a love of enquiry.

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AUTHOR’S DECLARATION

With the exception of the quotations and paraphrased remarks from

published or unpublished sources, which have been acknowledged in

the text, the following thesis represents my own original

contribution. This thesis has not previously been presented for an

award at this, or any other, University, nor been published elsewhere.

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INTRODUCTION

No great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers [. . .].There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle.1

In 1873, a young and relatively unknown artist exhibited her first

large military oil painting, entitled Missing (fig.1), at the Royal

Academy. Although the work was skied, it received reasonable

reviews, the Architect praising the “capital drawing of the horse” and

the “honest and artistic” manner of representation of the figures,

which deserved “a place lower down” on the wall.2 The theme of the

painting was taken from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which

“was still uppermost in [the public’s] thoughts”.3 It shows a wounded

French colonel “riding a spent horse, and a young subaltern of

Cuirassiers, walking alongside”, both “‘missing’ after one of the

French defeats, making their way over a forlorn landscape”.4

Although military in subject-matter, the work pointedly avoided

conflict and showed instead the sheer fatigue of the two men,

struggling to reach safety, each taking comfort in their physical

proximity. Centrally placed on the canvas, the younger soldier with

eyes closed clings trustingly with both hands to his officer, as if to a

father figure. He leans wearily into the side of the solitary mount

with an expression of utter exhaustion. He can go no further. The

colonel shifts the reins into his right hand to free his left, tacitly

giving permission for this intimate gesture of reassurance, as he

looks desperately towards the horizon for signs of rescue or shelter.

Their uniforms are crumpled and torn and the younger soldier

appears to have lost his cap along the way. The horse, meanwhile,

drops its head disconsolately and paws feebly at the ground with its

1 These words were spoken by John Ruskin in a commencement speech entitled War delivered to the cadets graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in December 1865, Ruskin, 1904: 116. 2 The Architect, 24 May 1873: 273, which ignoring Butler’s descriptive words, refers to “the figures of victor and captive”. 3 Butler, 1993: 78. 4 Butler, 1993: 78.

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front hoof. This pathetic triangular composition is set against a large

bleak sky, with evidence of a war-ravaged countryside in a broken

tree stump to the right, patches of gorse and stones to the left. Whilst

some art historians have claimed that this painting was modelled on

early nineteenth-century French military art, with particular reference

to Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815-91), Missing distinguishes

itself by its close attention to the individual suffering of these two

men.5 Whereas Meissonier in his painting, 1814: Campagne de

France, (1864) (fig.2) depicts collective endurance as Napoleon

leads his troops in the snow, Missing dwells on the individual

emotions of the two men fatally separated from their regiment,

inviting the viewer to contemplate their plight, their fatigue, their

courage and their human companionship in adversity. This is a scene

of extreme desolation, and one which in its hopelessness seeks to

evoke empathy in the viewer.

The choice of just such an isolated incident in British battle art was

not entirely novel, as Thomas Jones Barker (1815-82) had shown in

1855 when he exhibited his painting entitled The Charger of Captain

Nolan Bearing Back his Master to the British Lines (fig.3). Rather

than representing the heat of battle, Barker portrayed the lifeless

body of the captain as his faithful horse returned with him to the

British camp following the Charge of the Light Brigade, but with a

marked absence of the effects of war on Nolan’s body or his pristine

uniform. Instead, he appears asleep, expressionless, as if the

transition from life to death is essentially bloodless and without pain,

a purely anaesthetised, dreamlike and accordingly more palatable,

representation for a public audience. Not so Missing, which in its

sympathetic rendering of the two men focussed on the misery which

war can bring to soldiers far from home, not just during, but after a

battle. This was something new in British battle painting and the

artist, Elizabeth Butler, formerly Thompson (1846-1933), was

5 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 22, 163.

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delighted with her success, her first at the Academy.6 Not only was

the painting well reviewed; it sold.7

This was not her first military venture. As a child she had filled her

sketch-books with drawings of soldiers, horses, battles and

tournaments (fig.4), and had “relieved [her] feelings” of frustration in

the elementary class at the South Kensington School of Art “by

ornamenting the margins of [her] drawing paper with angry

scribblings of horses and soldiers in every variety of fury”, keen to

follow her own artistic inclinations, when instructed to copy “hateful

scrolls and patterns”.8 On her nineteenth birthday, her visit to the site

of the battle of Waterloo made a deep and lasting impression on her,

as her thoughts were filled with “those slaughtered legions, dead half

a century ago, lying in heaps of mouldering bones under that

undulating plain”.9 Already Butler was interested in the pity and not

the glory of war, though she did enjoy the splendour of parades and

colourful red uniforms, and by 1868 was submitting watercolours on

a military subject to both the Society of Female Artists and the

Dudley Gallery. It was one of her paintings at the Dudley, Soldiers

Watering Horses (1872) (private collection), completed after a visit

to witness army manoeuvres in Southampton, which caught the eye

of Manchester industrialist, Charles Galloway. When buying this

painting, he commissioned Butler to produce an oil painting on a

military theme of her choosing. Butler elected to paint a scene from

the Crimean War of 1854-56, Calling the Roll after an Engagement,

Crimea (the Roll Call) (fig.5). It was this painting, exhibited at the

6 This was her third submission to the Royal Academy, the previous two entries having been rejected, notwithstanding the success in Italy of her second entry, The Magnificat, which was returned damaged, Butler, 1993: 66, 77. For ease of reference Butler will be referred to under her married name throughout. 7 Unfortunately the current whereabouts of this painting are unknown and in the 1987 exhibition of Butler’s work it was represented by a photograph, courtesy of Viscount Gormanston, a descendant through Butler’s daughter, Ellen, Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 54. 8 NAM, 6310-3-2; Butler, 1993: 8; other sketchbooks dated 1866? [sic] and 1866 are held in the British Museum under references 1966,0118.1.2-29 and 1966,0118.2.1-42. 9 Butler, 1993: 25.

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Academy in 1874, which changed her life and arguably transformed

battle art in late nineteenth-century Britain.

In his 1980 article, ‘Representing the Great War’, Jon Bird refers to

the structured values and beliefs of the Edwardian society of thirty

years later, and the “tendency towards the maintenance and

reproduction of the social body” being of “such force as to severly

[sic] restrict any expression of oppositional ideologies”.10 I would

argue that this is too absolute a view, and ignores the effect of

Butler’s more nuanced oeuvre on late nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century battle art, a genre hitherto generally viewed as

purely formulaic. In this thesis, I chart the move towards a graphic

representation of the rank and file in Butler’s art which served to

alert the public and the art world to the brutal effects of war on the

individual soldier and how this move impacted on her fellow late-

Victorian, and now little-known, battle artists such as Ernest Crofts

(1847-1911), John Charlton (1849-1917), Richard Caton Woodville

(1856-1927), William Barnes Wollen (1857-1936), and Godfrey

Douglas Giles (1857-1941). A primary concern of this thesis is the

exploration of the “modernity” of late nineteenth-century British

battle painting and the relationship of selected works by these artists

to that elusive and ill-defined term, modernism. As Raymond

Williams has so cogently argued, modernism is an artificial construct

and one which depends on a selective tradition, frequently neglecting

those works of art which do not fall conveniently into such categories

as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism or

Vorticism. In considering the onset of modernism, he argues that

without the earlier novelists of the nineteenth century, such as

Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert or Nikolai Gogol there would be

no Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka or James Joyce.11 This proposition is,

by analogy, a useful tool when considering developments within the

late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art worlds, and I aim to

10 Bird, 1980: 42.

11 Williams, 1989a: 32.

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show how this late-Victorian cohort of war artists similarly impacted

on a later generation.

In order to pursue my argument for their place within this continuum,

my approach has been influenced by the view of art historians David

Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, that modernism reflects social

change.12 At the same time, as has been demonstrated by Elizabeth

Prettejohn, it is acknowledged that the modern study of art history

has ancient foundations, and that modernists are interested in

continuity as well as rupture.13 In countering the claims by Charles

Harrison that British, and specifically English, art has little to

contribute to any history of modernism, Peters Corbett and Perry

argue convincingly for modernism in art as being “oppositional” or

“socially progressive”, “whether formally innovative or not”.14 This

definition allows for a wide spectrum of artistic responses, and one

which enables modernism to be used as much as a critical tool for

assessment as a thing in itself. Whilst recognising, therefore, that

these late-Victorian artists would see themselves very much as part

of the tradition of patriotism and Empire, and do not claim to

revolutionise artistic style, I argue that their representations of the

mid to late nineteenth-century army can equally be seen as reflecting

contemporary concerns.15 These are painters who offered the public a

fresh emphasis on the individual and nameless soldier – his pain, his

sufferings, his heroism and his nationalism – at or close to scenes of

battle at times of historic importance; so much so that I question

whether, and how far, without them there would be such a

flourishing of battle art in World War One.

Why, therefore, have these nineteenth-century painters specialising

in military subject-matters been so forgotten? Has their claim to 12 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 2. 13 Prettejohn, 2012: 1; Feldman, 2001: 453. 14 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 2; Roger Fry, too, lamented a “low standard of artistic conscience” referring to British art as a “minor school”, cited in Cork, 1999: 57. 15 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 2.

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being “modern” been eclipsed by the urge to focus, and to be seen to

focus purely on the present? Or has their art now become so linked to

politically disconcerting ideas of the British nation and Empire as to

obscure their value in assessing their influence into the twentieth

century, thereby impeding scholarly engagement with their work? In

particular, their perceived support for British colonial expansion as

of right makes for uncomfortable reading in the context of twenty-

first century sympathies and beliefs. Were they themselves casualties

of a new kind of warfare in which any experience of past conflict put

them at a disadvantage? How was modernity encountered through

battle art within this period leading up to the First World War and

how did these artists “engage with modern life and experience”?16 It

is significant that, even amongst scholars working in the field of art

and empire, these artists have been and continue to be neglected as if

they constitute merely a footnote to the history of nineteenth-century

painting, with little consideration as to what new insights a study of

their work might bring to the history of battle painting as a whole. I

shall be seeking to redress the balance by arguing that they made a

significant contribution to the genre of what we might call “war art”

of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reinvigorating the

genre during this period and as such they deserve greater recognition.

I argue that they responded to contemporary concerns through their

subject-matter, and in particular their focus on the rank and file, just

as they laid the foundations for an explosion of battle art arising from

the experience of the First World War. More specifically, I shall

suggest that it was these artists who first highlighted the suffering of

the ordinary soldier in context, both on and close to the battlefield in

such a manner that the viewer could not fail to notice the connection,

and which facilitated subsequent development of this more

humanitarian approach to battle art.

In reflecting upon these issues, my thesis will explore the manner in

which these military artists approached their work, what innovations 16 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 5.

21

they introduced and developed, where they exhibited and how their

works were viewed, before moving on to question their legacy. Is

there something particular about military painting which facilitates

an understanding of the transition through late-Victorian visual

culture into the twentieth century? This was a period which began

and ended with significant wars; wars between Europeans and not,

like “Victoria’s Little Wars”, governed by the urge to expand and

maintain trading relationships on a colonial basis; where war,

however physically remote, was not just an isolated event, but an

ongoing condition.17 Such scholarly attention as has been afforded

this genre of nineteenth-century painting has generally been

consigned to footnotes, articles in journals or otherwise scant

mention in generalised texts on art of the period. Few, if any, have

reflected upon the way in which the development of the work of

these military artists serves as an important link between the

aftermath of Waterloo and the onset of World War One. Interest in

the army has frequently been the province rather of military

historians, often focussing on the overall strategy of great

commanders or the intricate tactics of a particular engagement, and

using the occasional colourful painting merely as cover illustration.18

Such previous studies as there are have tended to dwell on the

comparison with France and it has been well documented that, unlike

the French, Britain had no firmly established tradition of military

painting.19 Indeed, as J.W.M. Hichberger comments, there was an

“intense debate” in the first half of the nineteenth century as to

whether such a genre existed in Britain at all, as confirmed by the

17 This is taken from the title to Byron Farwell’s 1973 book on colonial wars during Victoria’s reign, 1837-1901; Favret, 2010: 39. 18 See Driver, 2010: 146-57 where the author describes a similar experience in relation to Walter Crane’s map of the British Empire; as an example of a military historian using Butler for his cover illustration see Richard Holmes in Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket featuring Scotland Forever! 19 I have adopted the definition of military as pertaining to ground forces (more recently ground and air forces) as opposed to naval forces, the exploits of which have been more extensively covered. See, for example, the naval works on display at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

22

Newcastle Chronicle when reviewing Butler’s 1876 painting,

Balaclava (fig.6), opining that “France and Germany, and especially

France, can paint the nervous fury the indescribable tumult, the wild

roar and crash of battle”, whilst British “picturings of conflict of

battle have been mostly still-life studies”.20 Artistic interest in the

field of battle was regarded in nineteenth-century Britain as being

more suited to the supposedly bloodthirsty temperament of the

French and the self-aggrandisement of their leaders. Certainly it was

felt that French, rather than British artists, were steeped in the

tradition of military pictures in the high art manner of history

paintings, which ran counter to the allegedly more pacific nature of

the British. Paul Usherwood and Jenny Spencer-Smith confirm this

view of French dominance in their 1987 catalogue of Butler’s work,

citing the Athenaeum’s criticism of British battle paintings exhibited

at the Royal Academy in 1887 that “[m]ilitary art of this kind would

attract little praise in Paris, where they do things incomparably

better”.21 Similarly, Matthew Lalumia has observed that,

notwithstanding a British and allied victory at Waterloo, there

“existed no British counterpart to the new French iconography that

glorified Bonaparte as a semi-divine martial figure, or that portrayed

war with Romantic fervor” [sic], in contrast to the treatment of Vice-

Admiral Nelson in naval art.22 As Athol Mayhew observed in 1884

“[b]attle painting boiled but few pots on English hearths until very

lately”, singling out Butler, Crofts and Woodville in his list of British

military painters “who have gained their reputation principally

through the production of military or naval pictures”.23 In a

peculiarly ambivalent manner, art critics in the nineteenth century

continued to measure British battle artists against their French

counterparts, generally to the detriment of the former, whilst at the

20 Hichberger, 1988: 2; Newcastle Chronicle, 12 August 1876. 21 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 160. 22 Lalumia, 1981: 78. 23 Mayhew, 1884: 50, 51. I am not aware of any naval paintings by Butler, Crofts or Woodville.

23

same time deprecating the militant nature of the country which

produced the models to which artists were encouraged to aspire.24

British war artists generally sought to avoid the more vivid portrayals

of military battle scenes, concentrating instead on portraits of

commanders-in-chief and their staff, with or without a panoramic

background of unidentifiable (and expendable) figures on the

battlefield, reflecting a propensity towards portraiture in British art,

or on topographical drawings.25 These latter were regarded as “low

art”, frequently used purely for logistical or educational purposes and

with little aesthetic merit, while the former concentrated on the

aristocracy, surveying the field of battle from a safe distance and

ignoring the role of the ordinary soldier actively engaged in the battle

below.26 Academic artists were not often inspired to represent actual

conflict on the battlefield as Mayhew confirms, writing that George

Waterloo Jones (1786-1869), “was the sole battle-painter, pure and

simple, of his day”.27

I do not suggest that all nineteenth-century war paintings entirely

overlooked the common soldier, but apart from genre pictures, for

example, featuring veterans returning from battle, little attention was

given to their individuality and affect. Nor was it until 1770, with

The Death of General Wolfe (National Gallery of Canada) by

Benjamin West (1738-1820), that the commander was shown as

vulnerable on the field of battle, elevating military art to the

essentially didactic tone of history painting, a genre which briefly

became “highly regarded” in the first half of the nineteenth century.28

24 As Edward Morris has demonstrated, art education in Britain was seen to be vastly inferior to that in France, Morris, 2005: 26-49. 25 See, for example, the painting by John Wootton (1686-1764) of George II on the Field of Dettingen (1743). 26 Lalumia comments that “[t]his system of dominance in military affairs by titled men who were great property holders was viewed with especial pride as an important element of Britain’s unwritten constitution”, Lalumia, 1984: 12. 27 Mayhew, 1884: 51; George Jones, R.A., became Keeper of the Royal Academy. He was known as Waterloo Jones on account of his frequent choice of this battle as his subject, Harrington, 1993: 107. 28 Harrington, 1993: 114.

24

By the 1850s as Peter Harrington has noted, academic artists, such as

Barker, had already moved away from historical military scenes to

highlight particular contemporary incidents, so that in spite of a

renewed interest in historical portrayals at the end of the century,

paintings tended to focus on incident rather than on panoramic views.

These in turn were criticised for being “anecdotal” and inferior,

reducing the status of military painting to a niche market outside the

more highly prized genre of history painting, a market generally

favoured by military personnel and, increasingly, wealthy

industrialists such as Galloway.29

More recently, scholars have considered the consequences of war on

the different ranks as early as the eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries. Philip Shaw, for instance, in his 2013 work Suffering and

Sentiment in Romantic Military Art has drawn attention to evidence

of an incipient sympathetic public engagement in wartime scenes of

this period, challenging the notion that military art was restricted to

the glorification of war. He cites as an example Field of Waterloo

(1818) (fig.7), by J.M.W.Turner (1775-1851) which, he argues, in its

portrayal of women searching among the bodies of the dead after the

battle, is “by no means a simple celebration of victory”, but rather

“emphasises war’s tragic consequences”.30 His analysis demonstrates

how Turner’s focus is nevertheless on the costs of war to a class of

people and he does not address the impact on the individual as

individual. Meanwhile, Mary Favret in her study of suffering on the

home front in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where wars

were remote but virtually continuous, considers how conflict was

experienced at a distance through art and literature. She explores how

“the everyday” was “wedded to an awareness of war”, but an

awareness that was absorbed at one remove, maintaining a

distinction between imagination and actuality.31 29 Harrington, 1993: 237. 30 Shaw, 2013: 4-5; caption for the painting as exhibited at Tate Britain, ref: NOO5OO. 31 Favret, 2009: 160.

25

In focussing on the period 1854 to 1918, this thesis will chiefly

examine the artworks produced by this afore-mentioned cohort of

late-Victorian artists in three different major wars, the Crimean War

(1854-56), the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the First World

War (1914-18) and show how representations of these disparate

conflicts relate to and are influenced by each other. Chapter one will

deal with the first of these wars, tracing the development towards an

emphasis on the individual heroism and privations of ordinary

soldiers, the effects (and affect) of battle on both mind and body as

well as the domestic consequences at home, set against the rising

influence of the illustrated press. It will show how even in the chaos

and spectacle of battle, there was space for the quiet intimacy of male

physical comfort. In chapter two, I examine the Second Boer War,

exploring the rise of patriotism at the end of the century, together

with an emphasis on sacrifice, chivalry, sport and manliness,

influenced by a public school education, alongside the counter-

balance of the peace movement. In chapter three, changes in army

uniform, in particular the move from glamorous scarlet to plain

khaki, are considered along with the effects of photography and film.

Chapter four deals with the period of transition from the end of the

nineteenth century up to the First World War, the position of this

genre of painting within the particular nature of the Edwardian

period, and how the late-Victorian battle artists adapted to this new

era. I then examine the policy and practice of the World War One

official war artist scheme in chapter five, ending with a comparison

of the works of Butler, who was not part of the scheme, and John

Singer Sargent (1856-1925), who was.

I have used Butler as a connective thread throughout this thesis, and

not only on account of her longevity – she was born before the

Crimean War and survived the First World War by over a decade –

but also on account of what I am arguing was her radical, arguably

subversive, portrayal of the common soldier seen close to, and those

26

psychological effects of war not truly recognised until well into the

twentieth century. I examine the influence of her work and the

themes she championed. I explore the way in which these themes

were adopted and adapted by her contemporaries and were made

popular even at a time when Butler herself was falling out of favour.

I draw attention to the contributions of her contemporaries, many of

whose works straddled the academic and popular art markets,

locating these artists within a changing world. This was a period

incorporating the move from the well-established world of Queen

Victoria with its increasing interest in the army and the individual

soldier, to the uncertain milieu of King Edward VII; from the

expansion of Empire, to a fin-de-siècle anxiety when that staunch

imperialist, Joseph Chamberlain, started to speak of Britain as “the

weary Titan”; when Britain’s traditional naval supremacy was being

challenged from different directions; when three-fifths of the adult

male population were found unfit for military service and war, a new

technological war, was threatening.32 As Williams has observed, the

late nineteenth century was peculiar in witnessing the “greatest

changes ever seen in the media of cultural production”.33 I examine

how the works of these battle artists were influenced by these

changing circumstances and pressures, when what it meant to be

“modern” was constantly shifting. I explore how they were viewed

by the critics and the public, then and now, as they responded to

current events, from the public outrage following the treatment of the

ranks in the Crimea, to the growth of popular imperialism, through to

disillusionment with the conduct and outcome of the Boer War. I

then give consideration to the current venues of these works of art

and their display within the context of debates such as that

surrounding the 2013 Tate rehang.34

32 Friedberg used this as the title of his book, citing Chamberlain’s remark in 1902, “[t]he weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate”, Friedberg, 1988: [u/p] frontispiece; see Searle, 2004: 305 for statistics on fitness for military service. 33 Williams, 1989a: 33. 34 See Turner, 2009: 20-21; see also Bendor Grosvenor’s ArtHistoryNews blog, accessed 19 May 2013 where he laments, “[i]sn’t it sad that so much great art has to be hidden away?”

27

I place great emphasis on the need for a close, descriptive, analysis

of several of their paintings and illustrations in order to come to a

greater understanding of their conceptions and the social, historical,

political and economic factors which informed them. As Briony Fer

has written, “as soon as we use concepts to think about pictures or

ascribe meaning to them, we use language,” as this is our common

medium of synthesis and interpretation.35 However unsatisfactory

words may be, and they are indeed ephemeral, subjective and of their

time, as Jaš Elsner argues, art historians “have no choice”,

notwithstanding the “whiff” of “betrayal”, “but to do interpretative

description”.36 At the same time, I argue that it is important, if not

essential, for the viewer to combine a thorough consideration of the

image itself with any such detailed verbal analysis, for as Walter

Sickert observed, “if it could be described in words, there would be

no need to paint it”.37 Close examination of the images is particularly

significant in tracking changes in artistic practice during this period

when several artists, as they turned to the illustrated press for

employment, adapted their style of work to fit the pressures of

topicality, subsequently importing elements of this different genre

into their academic work. Woodville, in particular, was noted for his

“slap dash” approach to his exhibited work, raising issues of “finish”

and impressionism. According to Hichberger, he “appears to have

been trying to synthesise the dashing freedom of his newspaper

drawings with the demands of an academic audience” to the extent

that his painting, A Chip off the Old Block (Anne S.K.Brown Military

Collection), was exhibited in 1900 while the canvas was still damp.38

35 Fer, 1994: 15; see her discussion which follows (15-21) of the different emphases of two critics, the one, Max Buchon, placing emphasis on subject matter, the other, Emile Zola, on the medium of painting. See also the following who discuss this issue: Holly, 2007: 42; Elsner, 2010: 10-27; Mitchell, 1994: 151-81. 36 See Sontag, 2003: 25-26 on reading an image and Prettejohn, 2012: 261 f/n 56, who distances herself from Elsner’s proposition that art history can and should be seen as “nothing other than ekphrasis, or more precisely, an extended argument built on ekphrasis”, urging that any interpretation must constantly be measured against the image itself. 37 Cited in Tickner, 2000: 26. 38 Woodville, 1914: 82; Hichberger, 1988: 96; Harrington, 1993: 277.

28

Even more significant for Butler in terms of her legacy is the way

close analysis signposts a change in emphasis after she withdrew

temporarily from public view in late 1899 in sympathy with her

husband, William Butler, when he resigned his post as Commander-

in-Chief of the army in South Africa. His subsequent and vitriolic

victimisation as “pro-Boer” affected her both personally and

artistically, leading her to restrict her output significantly during and

after this period. As a consequence, her later work was characterised

by increasingly less challenging images as she ceased to present a

psychological profile of her subjects, choosing rather to privilege

action over demeanour. She was never to regain her former influence

or popularity, and she herself records overhearing a visitor to the

Royal Academy in 1905 comment “[h]ow are the mighty fallen” in

front of her painting, Homeward in the Afterglow: A Cistercian

Shepherd in Medieval England (private collection).39

It may be queried as to why the work of these artists matters in the

twenty-first century. Why should we care whether they languish in

store or in regional regimental museums, seen only by a very

restricted, and, in some cases, almost exclusively military audience?

My response to this is to argue for a closer examination of their work

in a period which covered some fifty years, during which society

underwent vast and irreversible changes in areas such as technology,

literacy, class structure; a period during which they consistently

produced pictures of a significantly different nature to war paintings

prior to 1854.40 The major wars of this period were seen through the

prism of military painting, illustrations, drawings, prints, posters,

cartoons and photographs, the accumulation of which informs these

changes in painting and society. If modernism is to be understood as

the “transformation of nineteenth-century societies” in “contested

39 Butler, 1993: 241; while Butler attributes this painting to 1905, it is recorded in the Royal Academy as entry no 959 in 1908, Graves, 1985: 249. 40 I have chosen this date to coincide with the outbreak of the Crimean War.

29

areas of representation thrown up by the new conditions of

experience in modernity”, then these works and these artists are of

significance for what they say about their late-Victorian and

Edwardian modernities.41

In these four years of centennial commemoration of the First World

War (2014-18), it is especially apposite to bring into focus the state

of British military painting at the outset, during and at the end of the

conflict. This was a war characterised like no previous war by the

collective desire to mourn, to be seen to mourn, to commemorate and

to remember. The senseless loss of millions of lives across Europe,

Asia and America was a hard burden for the survivors to bear, but a

burden eased in part by the artistic contribution of the period. It is not

my intention here to offer a detailed analysis of the works of the

official war artists, such as C.R.W.Nevinson (1889-1946), Paul Nash

(1889-1946), Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Eric Kennington (1888-

1960), Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) and David Bomberg, (1890-

1957) who have already been much researched. Instead, I argue that

it is too simplistic to imagine that their works were without British

(military) provenance, and suggest that they formed part of that

trajectory of battle painting during the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, which moved from the more formal portraits, to genre

painting, to a humanitarian focus on the predominantly white

individual soldier, to his pain and suffering and finally to the

collective anger and despair engendered by the new technological

face of trench and aerial warfare.

It is significant, too, that in the midst of this “war to end war”, the

centenary of Waterloo in 1915 was not forgotten.42 As will be

developed in chapter four most of these late-Victorian battle painters 41 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 2. 42This quotation is taken from H.G.Wells’ 1914 publication The War That Will End War, subsequently shortened in 1918 to “the war to end war” in The Fourth Year. The resonance of Waterloo continues as evidenced by the exhibition at the British Museum due to open in 2015, featuring the response of British artists to Napoleon Bonaparte.

30

were called upon to contribute to an international exhibition in the

heart of the City of London as part of a propaganda exercise, with

works chosen specifically to help remind the public and stir their

blood with images of the glorious exploits of the past. In two of his

entries, Saving the Guns at Maiwand (1881) (fig.8) and The Charge

of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman (1898) (fig.9), Woodville features

British soldiers as the underdog in their heroic struggles against

adversity, while Butler emphasises their courage under fire in

“Steady the Drums and Fifes!” The 57th (Die-Hards) Drawn up

under Fire on the Ridge of Albuera (1897) ((The Queen’s Regiment,

Canterbury). At a time of crisis it is evident that these artists, whose

works were displayed alongside rousing images of Nelson and

Napoleon Bonaparte, had not been neglected and their style, if

considered traditional, still appealed to the public they were required

to inspire. This was especially persuasive in the period prior to

conscription, not introduced until 1916, and I suggest is just one

indication of the much-overlooked significance of British battle

painting. In this thesis my aim is for a critical re-assessment of the

works, ideals, practices and legacy of these late Victorians in order to

contribute to re-evaluations of diverse artistic connections either side

of 1900.

31

CHAPTER ONE

THE CHANGING FACE OF BATTLE: ELIZABETH BUTLER’S MILITARY PAINTING

As you know, Nikolai, the period that precedes an engagement is the most unpleasant-it’s the only time when you have the time to be afraid, and fear is one of the most unpleasant feelings.43

Butler understood this anticipatory fear which she demonstrably

evokes in her painting. As she made clear in her autobiography, her

principle was not to paint conflict, but to concentrate on the emotions

of the ordinary soldier away from the action of battle.44 Nor, given

her many travels, did she ever personally witness an engagement,

viewing only battlefields after the event and regimental displays and

charges put on for her personal benefit.45 Some of these displays

were magnificent, and Butler’s privileged position within society

ensured that she had access to unlimited assistance from the army.

She records that Colonel Browne, “who did all in his power to help

me with the military part of it”, had “the whole Waterloo uniform

made for me at the Government clothing factory in Pimlico” in

preparation for her 1875 painting The 28th Regiment at Quatre

Bras.46 This is not to say that she was totally removed from the

horrors of war, especially after her marriage in 1877 to a soldier, as

evidenced by her poignant comment that “soldiers’ wives in war time

have to feel the sickening sensation on waking some morning when

news of a fight is expected of saying to themselves, ‘I may be a

43 Figes, 2011: 184, citing Leo Tolstoy’s letter to his brother from the Crimea in 1855. 44 Butler, 1993: 148; she did not always keep to her policy of avoiding conflict as is evident from both her teenage sketchbooks and her painting of The Defence of Rorke’s Drift 1879. 45 Butler, 1993: 96-100. She was also very fortunate in her upbringing which ensured for her the opportunity to travel through Europe as a child and into Africa as a married woman, visiting the battlefield site at Waterloo on her nineteenth birthday where she had a guided tour by a veteran; she was to return to Napoleonic themes on several occasions during her career, Butler, 1993: 24. 46 Butler, 1993: 96-100; see also Usherwood, 1992: 166 for a discussion of how Butler appealed both to a middle-class audience and the aristocratic army establishment which offered her such assistance.

32

widow’”.47 When she died in 1933, a correspondent to The Times

records her words: “Thank God; I never painted for the glory of war,

but to portray its pathos and heroism. If I had ever seen a corner of a

battle-field, I could never have painted another war picture.”48

In the aftermath of the Crimean War, Butler was instrumental in

changing the tenor of academic British military art by concentrating

on the effect of war on the individual soldier and aiming to represent

“the private’s point of view – not mine, as the principal witnesses

were from the ranks”.49 This would seem to be the key motivation in

all her military painting, although both her early and phenomenal

success and her subsequent obscurity raise many questions. How, for

example, did a young female artist come to execute the painting of

the year in 1874, and a battle painting at that? Why did she

concentrate on history paintings of military scenes and not the more

obvious landscapes or still-life art common amongst her female

counterparts? Why was her success so short-lived? How far was she

assisted or impeded in her career by her marriage to a general? How

should we view her legacy into the twentieth and twenty-first

centuries in terms of military art and, in particular, her contribution,

if any, to modernism? In order to examine these questions and to

situate Butler within this still much under-researched genre of

nineteenth-century battle painting, this chapter explores the

development of her radical approach as a painter of military scenes,

mainly, but not exclusively within the context of the events

surrounding the Crimean War.

Although Hichberger comments that “the details of Butler’s career

are better known than those of any other British battle painter”, apart 47 Butler, 1993: 153, who also became aware during the First World War of the difference between the real thing and a regimental parade, writing that “[t]his is war, and there is no doubt the bearing of the men is different. They were always smart, always cheery, but not like this”, Butler, 1993: 254. 48 The Times: 4 October 1933; the official obituary is dated 3 October 1933; this quotation comes from an unnamed correspondent, whose letter appeared the following day. 49 Butler, 1993: 149.

33

from her autobiography and Wilfrid Meynell’s monograph in the

1898 Art Annual, there is surprisingly still no biography of Butler.50

She is omitted altogether in both Linda Nochlin’s list of nineteenth-

century women artists in Women, Art and Power, as well as in

Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century edited by

Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland.51 Gill Perry ignores her in her

essay ‘Women Artists, ‘Masculine’ Art and the Royal Academy of

Art’ notwithstanding Butler’s near election as the first woman to the

Academy in 1879.52 Similarly, Griselda Pollock makes no reference

to Butler in Vision and Difference, Differencing the Canon:-Feminist

Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories or her essay, ‘Art, Art

School, Culture:-Individualism after the Death of the Artist’. This is

surprising when considering Pollock’s critique of a modernist art

history which celebrates a selective tradition – a tradition she calls a

“particular and gendered set of practices” – seemingly unaware of a

contemporary claim that Butler had “shown her sisters which way

they should go”.53 Nor is Butler referred to in more recent

scholarship by either Favret in War at a Distance or Shaw, whose

study, while primarily addressing the period up to 1850, strays into a

discussion of painters of a much later date.54 When reviewing the

1987 exhibition of Butler’s works at the National Army Museum, art

critic John Spurling referred to Butler and her husband as “outsiders”

on account of their Roman Catholicism and Irish connections, while 50 She is also mentioned in A Little Kept, the memoirs of her daughter, Eileen Gormanston. 51 Hichberger, 1988: 75. During the course of my research I have encountered two academics researching Butler with a view to publishing a biography, one an art historian, the other a lecturer in English. I have not had the opportunity of reading either as yet unpublished work. While Ellen Clayton’s 1876 two volume English Female Artists is dedicated to Butler, her entry is relatively modest, given her enormous popularity at the time. Even William Butler’s own autobiography fails to mention his wife by name, referring only to the fact of his marriage. 52 Perry, 1999: 90-107. 53 Pollock, 1988: 72; Pollock, 1996: 50-67; the quotation is from George Augustus Sala in the Daily Telegraph, cited in Meynell, 1898: 7, who goes on to say that with Butler’s painting of the Roll Call, “we see a manacle knocked off a woman’s wrist and a shackle hacked off her ankle”; see also Usherwood’s assessment of her “critical and popular success of such magnitude that, for a while, it seemed a new era for women artists in Britain was about to dawn”. Usherwood, 2004: 132. 54 Generally this work deals with the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, though it does include references to the twentieth century and mid-nineteenth century paintings of the Crimean War.

34

John Russell Taylor suggested that while Butler may have been side-

lined on account of her gender, this approach came funnily enough from both sides in the battle of the sexes: marriage and child-bearing as well as the patronizing attitude of men [which] held her back from a truly professional career and of late feminists have failed to take up her cause largely because of some obscure feeling that she was not really a woman artist.55

My aim for this chapter is a re-assessment of Elizabeth Butler’s

portrayal of the individual soldier and her representation of his

experience of war. Central to my argument lie Butler’s single-

minded focus on and empathy for the sufferings of ordinary soldiers,

which allowed for a significant change in the way that the rank and

file of the army was viewed by the public, and which in turn led to a

reworking of ways of representation within battle art.56 Through a

close analysis of selected paintings, I examine how Butler’s approach

altered the way both the British art world and the general public

viewed this genre, firstly at the time and then, later, towards the end

of the century, set against the pressure of subsequent disruptions to

her approach. Butler’s somewhat mysterious disappearance from

public awareness towards the last decade of the century and her

legacy will be considered in subsequent chapters, as I evaluate her

contribution to the field of Victorian and early twentieth-century

military painting; a contribution, which, I would argue, has hitherto

been greatly undervalued, if not completely dismissed, by art

historians.

As the Scarborough Mercury remarked of Butler’s 1876 painting,

Balaclava, “[t]o truly appreciate this work it must be studied in

detail”.57 This is true for all her work which can be most clearly

understood through a careful visual analysis of the intense detail

55 New Statesman, 5 June 1987; The Times, 2 June 1987. 56 Hichberger, 1988: 77 outlines a “few basic types of battle pictures” including “the last stand”, “the charge”, “after the battle” and “the march past” all of which, she contends, Butler pioneered. 57 The Scarborough Mercury: 23 September 1876.

35

which was integral to her art.58 In spite of what has been called visual

art’s “glorious resistance to being fully verbalized”, the very words

used to describe an image can be of assistance in reaching a deeper

understanding of the artistic motivation.59 Language, however, is, as

Elsner has commented, “a generalizing tool”, mediated through

personal experiences and values.60 It cannot of itself reproduce the

totality of the image and so it is crucial to start with, and return to the

painting and to allow space for what Griselda Pollock has described

as “some good hard looking”.61 It is by a close scrutiny of selected

Butler’s works, therefore, that I examine how carefully she

developed a narrative in her pictures. Her technique of building layer

upon layer of dramatic storyline is mirrored in the physical

construction of her paintings where the design is drawn firstly on a

piece of tinted paper in charcoal and white chalk, and then on canvas,

boldly outlining the figures in what she called a “shell jacket” – to

sharply define the form – before adding their uniforms and

accoutrements.62 I argue that it is essential to take time to read these

narratives attentively, to observe the outward presentation of her

characters, their facial expressions and their bodily interactions, one

with another, in order to understand the novelty and significance of

Butler’s approach.63

It may be queried why this detail is important and how it compares

with more modern interpretations of war and suffering, but it is, I

shall argue, at the heart of why many Victorians so appreciated and

admired her work. I suggest that it is this very detail in Butler’s work

in combination with her adherence to a subject matter of military

engagement, which has made it difficult for a twenty-first century 58 Fowler, 1991: 34. 59 Elsner, 2010: 26. 60 Elsner, 1995: 10-27. 61 Pollock, 1995: 38. 62 See Butler, 1993: 81; Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 20 give a fuller description of her technique. A modern equivalent of the “shell jacket” might be lycra; Butler makes it clear throughout her autobiography that she prepared carefully for all her paintings. 63 See the Graphic, 20 May 1876, which refers to Butler’s “power of entering into the life of her soldiers”.

36

audience, used to the faster pace of moving images and sparer

canvases, to read and to absorb her work. It has to be remembered

that a significant proportion of Butler’s contemporary audience,

whose inclinations were for their domestic spaces to be completely

filled with what we might now regard as clutter, would be familiar

with a crowded canvas, as the popularity of the 1858 painting Derby

Day (Tate Britain) by William Powell Frith (1819-1909), testifies.64

“Victorian viewers”, as Lisa Tickner has remarked, “knew how to

read a painting like a novel”.65 Nochlin’s somewhat dismissive – and

anachronistic – comment that Butler “may remind us more of Cecil

B. de Mille than Cezanne” with her cast of thousands is, I would

venture, not only exaggerated, but indicative of a twentieth-century

perspective, looking back to Butler through the theatrical spectacle of

twentieth-century media.66 It should also be remembered that Butler

was acutely conscious of the need to satisfy an exacting military

audience with detailed accuracy of her uniforms if she were to avoid

criticism, writing that she felt “rather fettered” by an almost

tyrannical obsession with military minutiae and an awareness that

“some people might say that I was too anxious to be correct in minor

military details, but I feared making the least mistake in these

technical matters”.67

Visualising Humanity

In Dawn of Waterloo. The “Réveille” in the Bivouac of the Scots

Greys on the Morning of the Battle (1893-95) (fig.10), Butler shows

the regiment waking up on the battlefield and although many soldiers

are still asleep, the nervous tension is palpable and a sense of

foreboding pervades the camp. As W.H.Pennington, a Crimean

64 Feldman, however, questions the modern view of Victorian parlours as a “place of Philistine prejudices, airless and overstuffed”, Feldman, 2002: 468. 65 Tickner, 2002: 18. 66 Harris and Nochlin, 1976: 54; I am not aware that this criticism has ever been levelled at later war artists as, for example, Stanley Spencer, whose paintings are full of minute detail. 67 Butler, 1993: 81-82, 99.

37

veteran observed, “it is at the hour immediately preceding daybreak

that the pulse of nature would appear to beat most faintly”.68 In this

large, busy and detailed painting, the composition is essentially flat,

with the uncertain sky taking up more than one third of the canvas,

significantly broken only by the two mounted soldiers arriving as

portents of doom, signalling the break of day and the transition from

sleep to battle, inertia to furious activity, their trumpets raised high as

they sound the réveille, and for those already awake, a certain frisson

is established.

To the rear of the painting, the horizon is turning creamy-white,

rising to a grey-pinky-grey streak with horizontal clouds of darker

grey, gradually shading into yet darker grey at the top. Shafts of pale

sunlight streak the faces and clothes of the central figures,

highlighting them against the dark background, their red uniforms

with white cross bands providing both contrast and reflection as the

light falls on the creases in the cloth, allowing Butler to create two

focal points, one emanating from the trumpeters, the other, more

intimate, concentrating on the figures round the fire.

To the left of the painting is a row of white horses, the “greys”,

waiting in line to be saddled and mounted. Some bend their heads to

feed whilst others appear restless, unsettled by the increasing activity

in the camp. As he stands with his back to the horses a soldier,

dressed in a dull red cape and helmet, holds his sword away from his

body as he deliberately wipes it clean in preparation for battle; an

eerie reference to the blood which will soon cover the blade is left

hanging in the air. It is a tribute to Butler’s skill that she manages to

convey a sense of slow-motion in this movement by the height and

downwards angle at which the sword is being held, a sense of

anticipation readily recognised by those who have experienced the

interminable seconds before inevitable disaster.

68 Pennington, 1906: 44; Pennington was Butler’s model in Balaclava.

38

To the front left of the canvas, lying on his stomach before a fire, a

still sleepy soldier raises his head to look around, supporting himself

by his forearms. His feet are splayed straight out behind him while

the backs of his legs down to the ankles are covered by diaphanous

deathly white gauze, which settles like a shroud around him. To his

left, his companion is fast asleep on his stomach, his head turned to

the right and his arms by his sides. Further still to the front, another

soldier lies on his side with his legs foetally drawn up, his bare fist

clenched in the chill of the morning and his cap lying just proud of

his head. His sword and holster lie within reach, glinting silver in the

dawn light. As he sleeps, he too is surrounded by a gauze-like

material on which he is resting, in a sinister evocation of winding

sheets for the dead. Situated at the point of his sword, his comrade is

awake and alert, his scarlet coat catching the early light as he rests

his left hand on one knee, his right hand under his duller red cloak as

he too watches the trumpeters, a set and dignified expression on his

pale face. In the crook of his left elbow can be seen the sleeping head

of his colleague, cradled childlike, as he lies wrapped in a dark

blanket, the light illuminating his immobile features, whilst behind

him a group of soldiers begin to rouse themselves.

As in Missing, the central action of the painting is triangular in

composition, the two mounted trumpeters forming the peak which

opens out to encompass the kneeling soldier to the left and a seated

soldier to the right. The trumpeters are both dressed in army red, red

feathers in their bearskins, a red echoed across the canvas, in what

Michael Baxandall might describe as a “liturgical” colour, indicating

sacrifice and the Passion.69 The focus of the triangle is the young

soldier staring straight out of the canvas into the distance beyond,

clearly lost in thought, almost certainly contemplating his fate as he

69 Baxandall, 2003: 139-40, who argues in his section “anomalous red” that one interpretation of the use of red in Renaissance painting is that it is “readily associable with the red of the blood Christ shed for us”. Red, he states is “one of the four liturgical colours, in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, a live and appropriate code, where red would stand for Sacrifice and the Passion”.

39

sits, ready dressed in his headgear and greatcoat (fig.11), and there is

much in his presentation to recall the central traumatised figure in

Butler’s earlier, 1876, painting Balaclava. As Wilfrid Meynell,

writing in 1898, commented, “the face of a plain soldier [. . .] is at

the very centre of the picture”.70 Literally and metaphorically, then,

this soldier’s face, with the dawn light on his cheeks and forehead,

the cavernous shadows round his eyes and mouth, is pivotal to the

painting and to its clear message. What will the end of the day bring

for him? Will he still be alive? Will he be injured or a prisoner? Will

there be victory or defeat? These have all become crucial questions

in which the spectators now share an emotional investment. Directly

in front of him and lying at right angles is a sleeping soldier, his arms

folded across his chest, his head slightly raised and turned to the

front. Notwithstanding the lack of engagement between these two

figures, the overwhelming reference of their positioning is to the

pietà, an impression heightened by the ethereal white shroud, settling

softly like clouds around the sleeping soldier who, symbolically, has

lain down his sword.71

To the right of the triangle is the seated soldier, smartly dressed, a

white feather on his bearskin and white cuffs on his red jacket

(fig.12). He is leaning forward, stretching out a white gloved hand to

touch gently the prostrate figure before him; whether to wake him or

to check if he is dead or alive is uncertain for the head of his

comrade is thrown back awkwardly, as if he has been left as he fell.

With his left hand to his cheek and his right still grasping his sword,

this figure, too, is covered in ghostly gauze, reflecting a secondary

light on the faces of these central figures.

Behind this group, other soldiers are rousing themselves slowly; one,

to the right of the painting, is holding up his cloak like a tent from

70 Meynell, 1898: 17. 71 This too has echoes of the earlier Balaclava, where a lancer bears a young trumpeter back in his arms from the Charge of the Light Brigade.

40

which he is emerging, the blood-red lining livid in the morning light.

Another clutches his cloak around his knees as he stares at a deadly

pyramid of weaponry in front of him. In the foreground various items

of battle gear are apparent, notably a dull red bundle which,

disturbingly, could contain a small man or boy but which shows no

signs of life.

This is a landscape where there are no birds, no wind, just a still and

foreboding backdrop to the battle to come and shattered only by the

sound of the trumpet. Although there are similarities between this

painting and the 1888 painting The Dream (Musée D’Orsay) by

Edouard Detaille (1848-1912), Butler’s soldiers are not dreaming of

a glorious outcome with Wellington riding at the front of a

conquering army. This is far from a scene of keen anticipation, and

there is no suggestion that these soldiers are spoiling for a fight. The

subject-matter here is of that very pregnant pause before battle and

the most famous battle of the nineteenth century for the British at

that, as the troops wet and weary from the previous day’s exertions

awake in the full knowledge that today is to be the most significant

and terrifying of their lives. Here they are on the field of battle before

a momentous struggle, uncertain as to how they will fare. John

Keegan in his book, The Face of Battle, confesses that, even with his

many years of writing on battles and lecturing officer recruits at

Sandhurst, he personally has very little understanding of the actual

experience of a battle.72 When talking of the cadets in the moment of

realisation that fighting is inevitable he puts it like this: “[t]hese

feelings [. . .] are the products of some of man’s deepest fears; fears

of wounds, fear of death, fear of putting into danger the lives of those

for whom one is responsible”.73

This, then, is a representation for the viewer of dramatic, adrenalin-

filled anticipation, full of danger, uncertainty and awesome

72 Keegan, 2004: 15. 73 Keegan, 2004: 18.

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premonition, a slow burning precursor to life and death activity. It is

essentially the soldiers’ story where Butler, by centring on the

individual, is able to create an arena for the rank and file, allowing

her to express their fear, stoicism and exposure in a manner unique at

that time in British military art, and an arena which allows for a

sympathetic appreciation by viewers of what it might really feel like

to anticipate violent death and injury away from home. References to

childhood, such as the cradling of a soldier in the crook of an arm, to

their foetal positions while asleep, to motherhood in the pietà and the

caring touch of hands, emphasise the youth and vulnerability of the

soldiers and make for Butler her point that “the fact that counts is the

power of touching the people’s heart, an “organ” which remains the

same through all the changing fashions in art”.74 It sits well with the

sentiments expressed by a Russian orderly at the siege of Sebastopol

who recalled “that grave-like silence [which] contained within it

something sinister: everybody felt that something terrible was

approaching, something powerful and threatening, with which we

would fight out life and death”.75 It is truly chilling.

By the time she painted Dawn of Waterloo, Butler’s career as a

military painter had stagnated, her early successes of 1874 to 1879

long past, owing in part to her choice of subject, refusing to bend

with the public’s increasing appetite for imperial, swashbuckling

triumphalism. Instead she continued to focus on British heroic

military disasters as in, for example, Floreat Etona (1898) (private

collection), an incident from the First Boer War (1880-81), or

immoral domestic policy as in Evicted (1880) (fig.13), which

dignifies a poor Irish tenant whose house has been torched.76

74 Butler, 1993: 90. She goes on to relate “an argument [she] once had with Lawrence Alma-Tadema on this matter of touching the heart. He laughed at me, and didn’t believe in it at all.” 75 Figes, 2011: 366, citing Prokofii Podpalov, orderly to General Gorlev, in the Redan, Sebastopol in June 1855. 76 See Usherwood, 1988: 32; Butler writes in her autobiography how on hearing of the eviction she “got an outside car and drove off to the scene, armed with my paints. On getting there I found the ruins of the cabin smouldering, the ground quite hot under my feet and I set up my easel there”, Butler, 1993: 158. Eileen

42

Although this latter is, unusually, not a battle painting as such, it has

that same insight into the effects of an aggressive action the victim is

powerless to prevent alongside a stoical acceptance of the same, and

significantly was an incident Butler was able to witness personally.77

With the exception of some of her work in the First World War,

Butler’s only real nod in the direction of representing actual conflict

as an adult, The Defence of Rorke’s Drift in 1879-80 (fig.14), was at

the express request of Queen Victoria.78 Butler, who commented

disparagingly that “everyone was still hurrahing over the defence of

Rorke’s Drift in Zululand as though it had been a second Waterloo”,

tried actively to avoid the subject, but the Queen would not be

diverted, even insisting that Butler include more Zulus in the

painting in order to highlight the British triumph.79 Notwithstanding

the positive public reception of this work which is referred to by

Usherwood and Spencer-Smith as her “last great popular success” at

the Royal Academy, the painting was not well received by the critics,

who deplored her use of colour and described the overall

representation as suffering “from not giving the main idea of the

engagement in question”, and “having a wooden, theatrical

quality”.80 As a result of the dip in her popularity, Dawn of Waterloo

did not receive the hoped for public acclaim when exhibited at the

Royal Academy in 1895, although in style and execution it belongs

firmly within the corpus of her earlier works, and was apparently Gormanston, Butler’s daughter, refers to her father’s experience as a twelve year old of witnessing just such an eviction which made a deep impression on him and suggests he persuaded Butler to make an eviction the subject of an Academy painting, Gormanston, 1953: 21. Butler was always aware that the subject would not be popular in England and she was proved correct; Evicted remained unsold and was hung in the Butler’s dining room at Dover Castle, Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 95. Floreat Etona depicts an incident in an unsuccessful attack on Laing’s Nek, South Africa in 1881 when one old Etonian is urging on another just before he is fatally shot. 77 Butler records that the woman was “very philosophical, and did not rise to the level of my indignation as an ardent English sympathiser”, Butler, 1993: 158. 78 Her 1917 painting, The Dorset Yeoman at Agagia, 26th Feb. 1916 (Dorset County Council), which also shows conflict, was similarly commissioned. 79 Butler, 1993: 149: the Spectator reported that “rumour says that a certain great personage for whom the picture was painted expressed disappointment at there being so few Zulus in the composition, whereupon Miss Thompson stuck a few more into the corner of the picture” cited in Hichberger, 1988: 82. 80 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 80; quotation from the Spectator cited by Hichberger, 1988: 82.

43

much admired by the soldiers, from “the generals down to the

traditional last drummer” at the Club House Aldershot.81 Nor was it

placed well by the hanging committee to Butler’s great and lasting

distress.82 Her meteoric rise to fame had been halted and her

influence on battle art, temporarily at least, suspended.

Visualising Soldiers

These men bear pain and mutilation with unshrinkable heroism and die without complaint.83

Representations of ordinary soldiers by the art establishment had

largely avoided visualisation of their characters and emotions,

focussing instead on images of impassive military commanders in

full dress uniform, or rows of faceless soldiers in a topographical

panorama. In accordance with the public view of their social value,

these ordinary troops had not been considered sufficiently worthy of

individualised representation and consequently little thought had

been given to the manner of their portrayal. The idea that a painter –

and especially a female painter – could derive artistic interest from a

private soldier’s body was novel and potentially shocking. While it is

true that earlier depictions of the deaths of Nelson and Wolfe had

shown individual dying heroes, these representations were of known

personalities, were romanticised and, like Captain Nolan, largely

bloodless. Both had achieved immortal status by dying at the very

moment of their victories; they were not represented in the agonies

of death, but rather almost seraphically, surrounded by their faithful

and grieving subordinates in quasi-religious poses reminiscent of the

pietà. Whilst in both cases the hero is comforted by his fellow

officers, nevertheless a respectful personal space around the actual

body is observed, fearful lest the “intimacy of the caress” would

transgress an unwritten taboo, and a clear line of sight is afforded the

81 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 107-108. 82 Butler, 1993: 194, and she sought “consolation” in Paris. She was still upset by the Royal Academy’s treatment of her the following year when she sent her next painting to the New Gallery instead, Butler, 1993: 205. 83 Vicinus, 1989: 84, quoting Florence Nightingale.

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viewer with the dying hero as its focus.84 It is as if to encroach upon

this space would be to engender a “sense of violation [which] is at

once more acute and personal”, and where religious resonances

abound – as in Christ’s injunction to Mary Magdalen not to touch

Him as He had not yet ascended to His Father in Heaven.85

The initial paucity of military paintings exhibited at the Royal

Academy during the Crimean War reflected a period of hesitation as

the fine art world drew breath, struggling to negotiate a way to

represent the conflict, to find a truly British, and celebratory, voice

which would appeal to the wider constituency, a voice which was left

rather to printsellers and dealers.86 Britain, it was widely believed,

was not a military nation, unlike its continental neighbours, and it is

certainly true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

“public experience of war was [. . .] remarkably indirect”.87 Such

wars as were fought were miles away on foreign soil, “human

perception and feeling” limited by their distance.88 It was not

surprising therefore that, initially, portrayals of the 1854 Battle of

Alma by both Jones and Edmund Walker (1836-82) followed the

more usual panoramic and distanced approach with a large scale

view of the battlefield.89 Neither was particularly well regarded,

Walker’s painting showing a simplistic and stylized representation of

the clash between the British and Russian armies, with a mass of

anonymous but identical soldiers, whilst Jones’s canvas was said to

be a preliminary study only for a full scale work which did not

follow.

84 Das, 2005: 27. 85 Das, 2005: 7; see the Gospel according to St John, chapter 20, verse 17. 86 Hichberger, 1988: 52-53. 87 Bonehill and Quilley, 2005: 41; Mayhew, 1884: 50 confirms this view, writing that “[b]efore the advent of Miss Thompson a fashion had grown and taken deep root among us that we had never been and never would be a military nation”. 88 Favret, 2010: 1. 89 See Harrington, 1993: 138; Walker’s birth year is uncertain and may well be earlier as he is known to have been active between 1836 and 1862, NAM database.

45

When Edward Armitage (1817-96), sent by Ernest Gambart to the

war zone, exhibited alongside William Simpson (1823-99) at the

1856 Crimean Exhibition, he abandoned this more panoramic

approach, choosing instead to highlight more discrete episodes in his

two paintings, The Battle of Balaclava and The Battle of Inkerman,

though neither featured the impact of war on the individual. Opinion

was divided, the Art Journal referring to his “imperfect conception”

of the battle by failing to show “more of the field and more of the

dispositions of the enemy”, while the Illustrated London News refers

to his “large, nobly conceived and finely executed pictures”.90

Although Gambart had intended Armitage’s paintings to be engraved

for a wider public audience, this never happened, possibly, as

suggested by the Art Journal, as a result of the Indian Uprising of

1857, or, as Hichberger postulates, on account of Gambart’s

dissatisfaction with the result.91 Whatever the reason, neither

painting appears to have survived.

It was only with the two paintings by Thomas Jones Barker,

submitted to the Royal Academy in 1855, that we can detect a shift in

the approach to the depiction of war. The first represented the dead

body of Captain Nolan and the second Major General Williams and

his Staff Leaving Kars 28 November 1855 (1857) (National Army

Museum), featured a capitulation by a British regiment. Both these

works dwelt on an individual incident, eschewing a grander overview

of the battle. Neither reflected well on the military command, Barker

instead profiling the admirable qualities of the horse in the first

painting and those soldiers whose duty it was just “to do or die” in

the second.92 The point is well made as Barker offers up the moral

high ground to the vulnerable who, in their obedient stoicism, have

merited recognition through their centrality in the composition.

90 Cited in Hichberger, 1988: 55; ILN, 22 March 1856. 91 Hichberger, 1988: 54, citing the Art Journal, 1861: 30. 92 Lewis-Stempel, 2007: 191, quoting Private Parsons who describes how a “soldier has no place for fine feeling, and at the call of duty he must do or die, and leave the sentiment for others”.

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This focus on the rank and file was followed and developed by other

respected artists, including Scottish academician, Joseph Noel Paton

(1821-1901). These scenes of “quiet felicity”, often portraying the

returning trooper, had the advantage of appealing to a more domestic

sensibility, emphasising the effect of war on the soldier’s family.93

They were also significantly more attractive to a growing middle-

class market mainly on account of the more manageable size of their

canvases.94 In Home (fig.15), painted twice, once in 1855-56, and

again in 1859, Paton depicts an intimate scene of a family reunited

on the soldier’s return from the Crimea. The central figure is a

wounded corporal in the 1st battalion Scots Fusilier Guards, seated,

and with his eyes practically closed in utter exhaustion. Kneeling at

his feet is his young wife, her eyes similarly closed as if in silent

prayer, whilst behind him his mother leans her head forward onto his

shoulder, her white cap obscuring her face, her hand reaching

forward to touch her son in comfort. There is no distancing here,

with the three figures in a triangular, interlocking formation, the

soldier’s right hand round his wife’s waist, and the wife’s right arm

reaching forward to replace her husband’s missing arm, making him

whole again and linking with the older woman in a regenerative

circle.95 The scene is both intimate and touching, and it is clearly

easy to see how it would appeal to mid-Victorian families at home,

eagerly hoping for an early reunion with their loved ones. Signs of

hope and renewal are evident in the sleeping baby in the cradle to the

left of the group, and indications of a former life are illustrated by a

fishing rod hanging above the bed. The cotton reel which has fallen

to the floor as the wife has risen to greet her husband and a Bible,

with spectacles resting on the open page, indicate that life had

continued for the family in the soldier’s absence, though his injuries

show that from now on it can never quite be the same again. 93 Roberts, 1982: 89, citing a review in Blackwoods Magazine in 1869. 94 Roberts, 1982: 89. 95 That the wife is able to make her husband whole resonates with the New Testament miracle of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.

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In the Athenaeum this painting was described as “full of poetry [. . .]

the best work the late war has yet called forth”.96 The Art Journal

commented on its “moving eloquence”, whilst Ruskin referred to it

as a “most pathetic and precious picture” and certainly Paton has

captured an element of the pity of war.97 Yet the challenge of a

realistic and raw representation of the effects of battle, or the reality

of life at the front, has not been fully met by mid-Victorian artists.

Whilst we are made aware that the soldier has lost his arm, the

dominant atmosphere of the scene is peaceful as his loving family

gathers him up in its bosom, far removed from the horrors of war. In

its appeal to both soldiers and their families, it was immediately

popular as evidenced by a number of paintings on a similar theme,

including Story of Balaclava (1855) (private collection) by Rebecca

Solomon (1832-86), Home Again (Tate Britain) in 1856 by James

Collinson (1825-81) and Well-Known Footstep (private collection) in

1857 by Richard Redgrave (1804-1888). All featured an explicitly

domestic scene where the homes of the soldiers are tidy, calm and

well-ordered and, although praised for “simplicity and truth”, present

a reassuringly idealised picture of mid-Victorian Britain. There is

very little to confront the realities of war on the ground in such

works which emphasise instead the ability of the family to absorb

and make good the soldiers’ experiences.

Hichberger has suggested that Butler’s “method was, theoretically,

based on genre painting in its emphasis on unidealised individuals”

and it is tempting to see her paintings as a series of portraits of

victims, such as Paton’s corporal. It is demonstrably true that it was

not uncommon for artists to represent generals and other notables

gathered together, as evidenced by the work of Augustus Egg (1816-

63), Barker (fig.16) and the photographer, Roger Fenton (1819-69).98 96 The Athenaeum, 10 May 1856. 97 Art Journal, 1856: 161. 98 Hichberger, 1988: 83; See Augustus Egg, The Council of War (1856), in the Royal Collection, Barker, The Allied Generals before Sebastopol (1856), (private

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Certainly there are elements of this in Butler’s work with its clear

focus on character representation, as she followed her sister Alice

Meynell’s advice to “love the soldier and to love him individually,

not in battalions”, but, I would argue, this is unnecessarily restrictive,

for her conception and ambition were on a grander scale.99

Significantly, at no time did she follow the popular trend for

portraying the families either on the soldiers’ return or on receiving

news of their death, concentrating instead almost exclusively on male

subjects, and all are represented in context, close to the war front.

She may well have gone into the “byways of battle” as advised by

her family and in her concern to avoid actual conflict, but in so

doing, she has used the larger canvas of war and its devastation to

grapple with the horrors of death, injury and annihilation and to

move away from “the cloak of cleanliness and heroism that Victorian

ideology and war propaganda had wrapped around” contemporary

images.100 Whereas nineteenth-century women were generally

excluded from “access to the high realm of History Painting”,

Butler’s novelty lay in her ability to frame her close attention to

intimate detail ostensibly within this respected academic genre (as

seen in Dawn of Waterloo), and through which she was able to

convey truths about a soldier’s life, his “lived experience”.101

Representation of suffering was not a new phenomenon in the

nineteenth century and as Susan Sontag has observed, such

iconography “has a long pedigree”.102 This can be seen, for example,

in Greek sculpture, the early religious paintings of Christ’s Passion

through to the secular series, The Disasters of War (1812-15)

collection) and Roger Fenton, Council of War Held at Lord Raglan’s Headquarters (1855) (Gernsheim Collection). 99 Alice Meynell, who (along with her husband, Wilfred Meynell) wrote as John Oldcastle in Merry England, vol.8 1886: 209. 100 Merry England, vol.8, 1886: 209; Das, 2005:43. 101 Nochlin, 1994a: 86; see Zakreski, 2006: 62, in her discussion of history painting, generally regarded as “beyond the scope of the female artist’s power and imagination”; final quotation is from Charles Ricketts, cited in Peters Corbett, 2004: 5. 102 Sontag, 2003: 36.

49

Spanish National Library) by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), while

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), in his advice to fellow painters,

advocated that “the image should appal”.103 What was new in British

battle painting of the 1870s was a move towards a realistic depiction

of war, and one which represented not just the glamour, but also the

resulting ruination; one which responded to contemporary concerns

and which brought home that

[t]his is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War dismembers. War ruins.104

Already in the eighteenth century there was clearly an awareness of

suffering, to which Philip Shaw has drawn attention, citing Francis

Hutcheson’s words in 1755, that “[w]hen we see or know the pain,

distress or misery” of others, “we feel a strong sense of pity and a

great proneness to relieve”.105 The issue for the painter was how to

represent Sontag’s description in a way that did it justice, and justice

to the total experience – the drama, the fear, the pain, the suffering,

the noise, the smells and even the boredom. Was it in fact possible to

represent such multi-sensory experiences through the material

medium of paint? As Terry Eagleton has queried in the Ideology of

the Aesthetic, “[h]ow could a word, as opposed to a pair of nostrils,

capture the aroma of anything”?106 By analogy, how could Victorian

artists, especially those without direct experience, interpret the

essence of the battlefield in a two-dimensional work of art, in a way

which could be readily appreciated? With her “uncompromising

truthfulness”, Butler undoubtedly captured the sense of the pain,

distress and misery of others in her representation of soldiers, whilst

103 Sontag, 2003: 61; Goya’s series of etchings was not made available until 1863. 104 Sontag, 2003: 7; compare this with George Augustus Sala’s comment on Butler’s Balaclava “[w]e know now, thanks to the painter’s genius, what war is-a bloodthirsty brawl, and what war really means-namely, slaughter and mutilation, blood, ruin, agony and death”, cited in Lalumia, 1984: 143. 105 Shaw, 2013: 12. 106 Eagleton, 1990: 343; see, too, Charles Dovie cited in Sillars, 1987: 3-4, “words cannot convey even a suggestion of the sounds heard and the emotion felt, when every faculty is heightened, when every nerve is tense.”

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acknowledging the multi-dimensional sensations provoked by war.107

As has already been noted in Dawn of Waterloo, she demonstrated an

awareness of the power of touch between the men, which ran counter

to the “dissociation of touch from sight” within a “separation of the

senses” in the nineteenth century as observed by Jonathan Crary.108

Obliquely, too, sound is evidenced by the trumpets at réveille in

Dawn of Waterloo, and, later in Balaclava (fig.6), inversely

referenced in both the silent instrument of the dead trumpeter and the

catatonic insensibility of the traumatised hussar. As Nicholas

Saunders has observed, in relation to World War One with its

“landscape of trenches, dug-outs, deafening artillery bombardments

and blind advances across smoke-filled No Man’s Land, the visual

sense was often denied”.109 I do not wish to suggest that Butler

denied the power of looking, but rather that she was able to convey a

more rounded sense of the battle experience by her close attention to

sensory detail.

That apart, was there a balance between realistic representation and

what the public could accept, especially in an era prior to twenty-first

century instantaneous news, flashing graphic images of conflict,

torture and terror twenty-four hours every day? How did the viewer

receive those representations where the “images of war and of the

cruelties carried out in these conflicts tested the limits of what we

look at and how we look”?110 When voluntarily submitting to images

of violence, say, at the cinema, or on the television, it is not

uncommon for the viewer to deflect his or her gaze momentarily to

filter the visual impact, hardly daring to look, yet secretly wanting to

see, and allowing the imagination to supply the details. Others

positively enjoy the looking, and treat it almost as a sport or an erotic 107 The Morning Post, 7 May 1874. 108 Crary, 1998: 19. 109 Saunders, 2004: 9, writing of experiences in the First World War. This is not dissimilar to descriptions of the bombardments outside Sebastopol, “the heaviest in history until that time”, where the “cannonade was incessant” and where an experienced artillery man confessed that he “could not understand or make out anything”, so heavy was the attack, Figes, 2011: 356-59. 110 Nead, 2011: 306.

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experience, deriving a “morbid thrill” from the sight of a body

mutilated or in pain.111 Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, in their

work on the atrocities in Abu Ghraib prison, comment of a young

military policewoman Sabrina Harman that “she liked to look. She

might recoil from violence, but she was drawn to its aftermath”

adding that “when others would want to look away she’d want to

look more closely”.112 Harman wrote to her father that on “June 23 I

saw my first dead body. I took the pictures! The other day I heard my

first grenade go off. Fun!”113 In actions that were on the brink of

“war tourism” with the denigration of the dignity of her subjects, the

pictures she took included a body just arrived and drenched in undimmed blood, mummified bodies smoke blackened here and ashen there; extreme close-ups of their ghastly faces, their lifeless hands, the torn flesh and bone of their wounds a punctured chest, a severed foot.114

While Harman may have enjoyed taking such photographs, and it seems

she did, in a sinister evocation of Edmund Burke’s comment that there

could be a degree of delight “in the real misfortunes and pains of others”,

as Ernst van Alphen asks, how far do artists have to brace themselves for

the task of representation?115 Not only does the artist have to confront the

horrific cost of battle and to find ways to do it justice, there is additionally

the issue of the effect on those portrayed and their loved ones to consider,

for just as there is an “ethical quality of remembering”, so there is an

ethical dimension to representation.116 Given the very personal nature of

the experience, what right does either the artist or the spectator have to

look at images of people in extremis and without their consent? Does he

or she risk the charge of belittling the enormity of the experience for the

sufferers quite apart from any issue of artistic competence? If so, how far

did Butler and her contemporaries deal with these ethical issues? Or did

111 Das, 2005: 153. 112 Gourevitch and Morris, 2009: 74. 113 Gourevitch and Morris, 2009: 74. 114 Gourevitch and Morris, 2009: 74. 115 Sontag, 2003: 87; Van Alphen, 1993: 42. 116 Sontag, 2003: 103; Malvern refers to “artistic guilt at preying on the deprivations and suffering of others.” Malvern, 2004: 91.

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they recognise an overarching morality, a morality which it is the duty of

the serious artist to promote to the best of his or her ability in order to

strike at the very essence of their subject-matter and allow the spectator to

reverence?117

The Spectacle of War

War is such a peculiar thing – inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many.118

Butler was only eight years old at the outbreak of the Crimean War

in 1854, but it is clear that it captured her imagination along with that

of a large section of the general public. Nearly forty years had

elapsed since the British had been engaged militarily against a

European power and the 1815 army of Wellington at Waterloo was

only a distant and imperfect memory. These forty years had not

improved the state of the army which, although employed almost

continuously in various parts of the Empire, had not been tested

against a European enemy of similar military stature. Many of the

officers were elderly and were led by Lord Raglan, who, while

serving under Wellington, had lost his right arm at Waterloo. In spite

of his disability and his sixty-five years of age, he was considered by

the army to be “just the man for the job”.119 The British public was

initially excited by the prospect of war and “supremely self-

confident” given Britain’s then dominant position on the world stage,

waiting eagerly for the expected news of success.120 “Suddenly a

change came over the people with every sight of the Queen’s

uniform calling forth emotions of enthusiasm” so that “the pulse of

the whole country beat for her soldier sons”, and by November 1854 117 In his novel, The Painter of Battles (2006), Arturo Perez-Réverte explores this issue when his main character is pursued by a war veteran whose photograph he took without permission; see also Tucker, 2012: 5 citing the condemnation by Mieke Bal of a “pleasure that is parasitical on the pain of others” and the analysis of Robben Island in Coombs, 2003: 88-89. 118 Morris, 2011: 30. 119 Known mainly as an administrator, Raglan had one advantage in that he could converse fluently in French even though he regularly referred to his French allies as “the enemy”, Royle, 2000: 113. 120 Royle, 2000: 120, 206.

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the Illustrated London News was reporting that “The Dreadful

Glories of the War Have Rendered the Army more Popular than Ever

it Was at Any Previous Period of British History.”121 The frisson

conjured up by the thought of battle was thrilling and exemplified by

the words of General Earle: “[i]t was the last battle of the old order.

We went into action in all our finery with colours flying and bands

playing”.122 What the public initially saw was the traditional

imagery, the splendour of war, and it was only when viewed close to

through verbal and visual reports that they began to see “war not as a

beautiful, orderly and gleaming formation, with music and beaten

drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war

in its authentic expression – as blood, suffering and death”.123

Regardless of the excitement evoked by the concept of glorious

battles, during the war itself it was the genre paintings, such as that

by Paton, which dominated the commercial art world, a move

enhanced by the rising prominence of print-sellers. By 1855 the

Illustrated Times was reporting that London was “alive with

illustrations of the war” endorsing J.S.Bratton’s observation that

“war is a major subject of popular art,” (my italics) as a result of

which “the bombardment of visual and specifically pictorial stimuli

became inescapable; the world was saturated with pictures”.124

According to Orlando Figes, this was a period when “the public

appetite for vivid descriptions of the Crimean campaign was

insatiable”, with the “greatest interest [. . .] reserved for images”.125

The public had become energised by the war and was eager for

information, leading to an explosion of popular artworks, theatrical

spectaculars, panoramas, lithographs and cartoons in what Stephanie

Markovits has referred to as the “generic permeability of the art of

121 Royle, 2000: 121 citing Timothy Gowing; ILN, 25 November 1854. This comment surprisingly was made after the notorious Charge of the Light Brigade. 122 Cited by Keller, 2001: 1. 123 Tolstoy, 2006: 192. 124 Illustrated Times cited in Harrington, 1993: 138; Bratton, 1980: 119; Booth, 1981: 8. 125 Figes, 2011: 306.

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the period”.126 Until this point, civilians had been largely unaware of

the conditions on the ground, gaining their information from the

front, such as it was, from the generals, and often couched in self-

serving terms, reinforced by the more traditional academic paintings,

highlighting the splendour of the battles fought, rather than the cost

in human misery.127 This situation was partially redressed by the

timely creation of the Illustrated London News in 1842, providing

the public with regular news items and factual comments at a period

of increasing literacy, along with sketches and cartoons, though even

this publication was initially reporting that “the arrangements for the

conveyance of the troops to their destination [were] of the largest and

most perfect character”.128 Speed of publication was of the essence

and by the end of April 1855 it was possible for news to reach

London from Varna, on the Crimean coast, within a few hours.129

During the campaign, circulation of the paper increased

exponentially, its popularity underlined by the painting A Welcome

Arrival (1857) (fig.17) by John D’Albiac Luard (1830-60), which

shows soldiers unpacking a parcel from home in a hut decorated with

cuttings from the newspaper, offering a reassuring picture of home

comforts, but with no hint of the horror of war as represented later by

Butler.130 This was a period of time when images of war were

predominantly popular and ephemeral rather than academic and

durable, a popularity which extended through many and diverse

manifestations, featuring absurdities and mismanagement rather than

lasting distress.

Nevertheless, Crimea as a theatre of war offered excellent

opportunities for the graphic representation of events and the

Illustrated London News, along with print companies, was quick to

send out independent civilian representatives to ensure the receipt of 126 Markovits, 2009: 168. 127 See, for example, The Battle of Waterloo by William Allan (1782-1850), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843. 128 ILN, 23 September 1854: 287. 129 Figes, 2011: 305. 130 Stauffer, 2012: 81.

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speedy and accurate sketches for publication.131 Colnaghis sent

William Simpson to the Crimea in 1854, just too late for the

spectacular Charge of the Light Brigade, while the Illustrated

London News followed with well established artists such as Joseph

Archer Crowe (1825-96), Charles Baudelaire’s “painter of modern

life”, Constantine Guys (1802-92) and Edward Angelo Goodall

(1819-1908).132 At the same time, the editor of The Times,

J.T.Delane, sent out his special correspondent, William Howard

Russell (1820-1907) who provided the public with a written day-to-

day account of events as he saw them. Described by one of his

friends as having an eye like a “lens”, and speaking the “plain truth”,

he railed in particular at the incompetence of the authorities, and

their inability to provide for the men in what turned out to be a bitter

winter, comparing their fortunes adversely with those of the French

troops.133

Simpson complemented Russell’s accounts with his series of

sketches entitled The Seat of the War in the East illustrating the poor

communications and terrible conditions the troops had to endure, as

for example in Commissariat Difficulties (fig.18), where he provides

critical visual confirmation of a lack of proper infrastructure.

Anticipating the landscape of World War One he shows the troops,

their carriages and buffalo being sucked down into the muddy water

before ever reaching the battle front, with the inevitable

consequences of disease, injury and unnecessary hardship. Other

print companies used drawings sent back by the soldiers themselves

while the press produced several special supplements, relating to the

few successes of a mishandled war, much of which had little about it

to celebrate. Here was a war, arguably the first “total war” and a

forerunner to the wars of the twentieth century, which was being 131 In 1855 they were followed by the Illustrated London Times, which sent out the artist, Julian Portch. 132 Baudelaire’s essay on Guys was not written until 1863. 133 Censorship was introduced following reports that Russian soldiers were reading British newspapers in the trenches and that Tsar Nicholas 1 had first read of the British ultimatum in the columns of The Times, Markovits, 2009: 2.

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fought (or not fought) under the microscope of public opinion and

the public did not like what it saw.134

Although these artists tended to confine themselves more to the

miserable conditions with which the troops had to contend, Simpson,

by then known as Crimean Simpson, did produce a striking

watercolour, Summer in the Crimea (fig.19), which in its simplicity

is menacing.135 In visual confirmation of Walter Benjamin’s view

that “the materiality of death disrupts representation”, Simpson

depicts what is at first sight an almost dreamlike still-life, with a

lizard, hallucinatory convolvulus and a butterfly in the foreground,

but which on closer inspection reveals itself to be a cruel, almost

surreal juxtaposition of life and death, for just as the butterfly settles

to feed, the cannonball beneath it is about to explode.136 In the

background, other explosions can be seen on the battlefield where

anonymous soldiers are sharing the butterfly’s fate, and although we

do not see these soldiers close to, Simpson’s representation hints at

the darker side of war on the field, where death and injury are

inevitable, hints which are subsequently developed later in the

century. 137

Meanwhile, John Leech (1817-64) of Punch and his fellow

cartoonists maintained a constant output of witty, pungent criticisms

aimed at the army hierarchy and government, while Paton, that

respected academician, eschewed fine art as he, too, turned to

cartoons, producing a vicious representation of a skeletal

commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan, on a skeletal horse, riding

roughshod over unopened chests of sought after food, clothing and 134 Figes, 2011: xix. 135 Guys did however show dead bodies in his drawing for the Illustrated London News, entitled Our Artist on the Battlefield of Inkerman, dated 3 February 1855, though the bodies were all face down with no obvious sign of injury, Stauffer, 2012: 81. 136 Benjamin cited in Goodwin and Bronfen, 1993: 19; see also the discussion in Schleifer, 1993: 312-33. 137 See Amy Lowell’s 1919 poem Peace, “Perched upon the muzzle of a cannon/A yellow butterfly is slowly opening and shutting its wings”, cited by Higonnet, 1993: 198.

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equipment in a sinister parody of heroic battle commanders

(fig.20).138 In his work for Punch early on in the war, Leech, like

Butler later in the Roll Call, had likened the common soldier to a

navvy in a cartoon entitled What Our Navvies Are Likely to Do,

referencing Work (fig.21) by Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), praising

him for his physical power and sheer masculine spirit.139 With news

of the army’s setbacks he became increasingly caustic, highlighting

the inadequacies of the establishment in the provision of food, warm

clothing and accommodation. In his 1855 drawing, Grand Military

Spectacle: The Heroes of the Crimea Inspecting the Field Marshals

(fig.22), he cleverly reversed the practice of featuring generals as

elevated heroes by portraying the commanders as those under

scrutiny from the troops and who did not pass muster. The message

was clear; it was the men at the front, the common soldiers who had

patiently endured the disease, the extreme cold, the shelling, the

endless hours in dismal trenches and the incompetence of their social

superiors, who emerged as the celebrated of the campaign. Once

again, the resonance of this in the First World War is unmissable.

This revolution in illustrated news transmission transformed the way

in which the army was viewed and to a large extent reinvented the

public perception of the common soldier, previously seen as an

underclass but now elevated to heroic status through suffering, often

at the expense of the aristocratic officer class. I suggest that it also

eased the way for the positive reception of Butler’s sympathetic

representations at the Royal Academy in the 1870s. Far from the

glorious triumphs initially anticipated, the public, thanks to this

“living-room” war, was learning of administrative failures,

138 Lalumia, 1983b: 31; the Art Journal, 1895: 123-24 describes how Paton resisted requests to publish this drawing for fear of injuring Raglan’s reputation; see also Leech’s cartoon New Game of Follow my Leader, lampooning the practice of the aristocracy pleading “urgent private affairs” to return home during the conflict, Punch, 24 November 1855, a practice not available to the private soldier for whom desertion was a serious offence, Hichberger, 1988: 136. 139 Punch 1854.12.16.242 discussed in Barringer, 2005: 40.

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inadequate planning, tactical blunders, death, injury and disease.140

Concern for the men at the front inspired an overwhelming response

in Britain to the Crimean Fund set up by The Times, sending out

money, food parcels and warm clothes. Even Queen Victoria claimed

to be “busily knitting for the army”.141 When the injured returned

home, the Queen made it her business to visit hospitals and invited

veterans to attend at Buckingham Palace to receive the specially

instituted Victoria Cross, pointedly a medal available for the first

time to all ranks. Both these events were celebrated in contemporary

artworks as, for example in Queen Victoria’s First Visit to her

Wounded Soldiers by Jerry Barrett (1824-1906) (National Portrait

Gallery), exhibited in 1865, and Presentation of the Crimean Service

Medals (1857) (Royal Collection) by George Housman Thomas

(1824-68) which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858.142 It

is no coincidence that it was the Queen who insisted on a private

view of Butler’s Roll Call at Buckingham Palace before purchasing it

for her own collection.

Alongside the few academic paintings of the Crimea, photography,

still in its infancy, had little to offer in terms of the soldiers’

experience of war. Not only was it handicapped by an inability to

take action shots, but Roger Fenton was further restricted by his

agenda of support for the then establishment rather than an insistence

on absolute truth.143 Consequently, his photographs, like Paton’s

Home, and Luard’s A Welcome Arrival, are generally comforting,

concentrating on army personnel and life in the camp. His

photograph entitled Hardships of Camp Life (fig.23), for example,

shows three soldiers relaxing as they enjoy a drink outside a solidly

140 Stauffer, 2012: 80. 141 Figes, 2011: 304; Queen Victoria also asked the Duke of Newcastle, as Secretary for War to write to Lord Raglan in November 1854 to ensure that no private soldier in the ranks would “believe that his conduct is unheeded”, adding that “[t]he Queen thanks him-his Country honours him”. Royle, 1999: 292. 142 Lalumia, 1984: 80-81. 143 John Stauffer rejects this view and offers as a possible explanation Fenton’s dislike of unpleasant images and his adherence to taste alongside his reluctance to get too close to the fighting, Stauffer, 2012: 82.

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built wooden hut with little sign of the so-called hardships of the title

and bears no relation to Simpson’s more graphic representations.

Very few photographs show the effects of battle. The Interior of the

Redan, for example, portrays only material debris after shelling,

while “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (fig.24) exists in two

versions, both believed to be taken the same day in April 1855,

featuring an isolated terrain after the battle, one at least of which is

said by both Sontag and Ulrich Keller to be artificially constructed

and misleading.144 Neither shows evidence of death or injury to army

personnel or animals. Joseph Cundall (1818-95) and Robert Howlett

(1831-58) alone, in their photographic images of limbless veterans

offer a visual confirmation of the human cost of war, but only after

the wounds have been nicely cleaned up and neatly dressed. It was

not for another decade, during the American Civil War of 1860-65

that photography really “bolstered the primacy of vision” when

Oliver Wendell Holmes was moved to suggest to those who wanted

to know what war looked like that they “look at this series of

illustrations” which showed “nothing but bodies, ordinary bodies, the

casual by-products of war”.145

Meanwhile, Robert Burford (1791-1861) seized on the Crimean War

as a suitable subject for his Leicester Square venue, exhibiting large

panoramic scenes from the Battle of Alma in the manner of mid-

nineteenth-century British battle painting, and the Siege of

Sebastopol (1855). It was not unusual for the depiction of battles,

both naval and military, to be displayed at places of popular, urban,

entertainment, such as Vauxhall Gardens and Leicester Square in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and such entertainment thrived

144 See Morris, 2011: 1-21 for a full discussion of the controversy; Stauffer also offers an alternative construction, Stauffer, 2012: 82; Felice Beato (1832-1909) is similarly thought to have disrupted photographic integrity by disinterring bodies at Secundra Bagh, Lucknow, for greater dramatic effect following the Indian Uprising of 1857. 145 Goldberg, 1991: 19, 26, though Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographic representations of Gettysburg were not available to the public for two years after the event.

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on this new injection of material.146 The panorama was particularly

suited to the representation of recent or contemporary events from

around the world, almost as a form of newscast, satisfying that

“nineteenth-century craving for information”.147 The enveloping of

the spectator within an all-round, but illusory experience created a

sense of “the absolute presence of reality” transforming what on a

flat canvas could appear rather dull so radically as to afford members

of the public what purported to be a first-hand sensation.148 The

panorama of war, reproducing battle action in a three hundred and

sixty degree rotunda was both breath-taking and dramatic. Already in

the early part of the nineteenth century, as Shaw has argued, the 1800

panorama of The Storming of Seringapatam (private collection, study

only) by Robert Ker Porter (1777-1842) “suggested a reorientation of

representations of war” in its greater concentration on the non-

aristocratic soldier, which “brought audiences into an unnerving

encounter with the persistent reality of death and wounding”.149 The

crowded nature of this canvas, however, and the distancing of the

soldiers, provides for a more complex reception; one which affords

the viewer simultaneously an appreciation of the splendour of the

engagement alongside a more sensitive understanding of war’s

devastating effects, but on a remote, not an intimate, individual scale.

We are being offered a battle as it happened, with all its confusion,

glamour and heroism, a scene which serves rather to encourage men

146 Hyde, 1988: 17. The three hundred and sixty degree patent was granted in 1787 followed by the use of the word “panorama” in 1791. 147 Hyde, 1988: 37; Jan Wolkers, visiting Panorama Mesdag in the Hague, describes the calm seaside scene before him as “overwhelming”, writing that [y]ou had the impression of a stiff sea breeze blowing hard through your hair, moist with spray” and “despite the dank reek of putty that hung about the place” said he had “never again smelled anything quite so salty”, Wolkers, 2003: 55. How much more moving would a battle be, providing just the right amount of excitement and information looked for in an era when public galleries were still in their infancy. In spite of their rooting in popular entertainment, Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West both conceded that panoramas had merit, whilst John Ruskin wrote that the panorama in Leicester Square was “an educational institution of the highest and purest value” arguing for governmental support, Hyde, 1988: 24-28. 148 Arnold, 2009: 342. 149 Shaw, 2013: 29; an engraving of The Storming of Seringapatam by J. Vendramini after Porter is located in the National Army Museum; in fact it was not a true 360 degree panorama, but rather somewhere between a 180 and 270 degree presentation; final quotation is from Favret, 2010: 217.

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to action than to warn against the consequences. What it does not do

is to bring the spectator up close to the participants, to observe and to

empathise with their individual pain. Nevertheless, along with

dramatic representations, moving dioramas and equestrian military

spectacles, the popularity of panoramas does serve to illustrate that

the “theatre of war” in the Crimea was truly being transposed for a

domestic audience, but one where war, as theatre, privileged

entertainment over empathy, drama over horror.150

The Pathos of War Before the 1870s none of these art works significantly referenced the

approach initiated by Thomas Jones Barker in his representation of

the effect of battle on the individual, concentrating mainly on war as

spectacle, quiet domestic scenes or on acerbic criticisms of the army

command. Then in 1873, the same year as Missing, Laslett Pott

(1837-98) exhibited his painting On the March from Moscow (fig.25)

at the Royal Academy which profiled a group of dispirited soldiers

tramping through snow, and owed much in composition to

Meissonier’s more famous 1864 Campagne de France, 1814

(fig.2).151 This, however, attracted little interest possibly on account

of its small canvas size or possibly its failure to feature any

individuality, dwelling rather on the format of the procession

itself.152 It was not until Butler produced the Roll Call in 1874, some

twenty years after the outbreak of the Crimean War, that the awful

impact on the ordinary troops took centre stage, coinciding with –

and perhaps initiating - a dramatic increase in battle paintings

exhibited at the Royal Academy.153

150 During the Crimean campaign at least twenty-five shows referencing the war were staged in London, Bratton, 1980: 130. 151 See the review in Art Journal, June 1873, vol. XXXV: 198. 152 The Architect, nevertheless did refer to it as “one of the most moving pictures in the exhibition”, Architect, 24 May 1873: 272. 153 Hichberger, 1988: 75 states that the number of exhibits in the period 1874-1914 tripled those in the pre-1855 period.

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Butler had “long been turning the Roll Call in [her] mind”.154

Contrary to her father’s warnings that the subject was outdated, the

Crimean War, with its sharp memories, was still very much in the

forefront of British thought, as evidenced by a critic of

L’Indépendence Belge in 1876, reviewing Butler’s subsequent

Crimean painting Balaclava [e]t l’on se sent profondément ému de voir qu’un peuple peut, après vingt et un ans, garder encore aussi présent, aussi cuisant, le souvenir de ceux qui moururent pour sa gloire.155

A.W. Kinglake’s eight volume work, The Invasion of the Crimea: Its

Origin and an Account of Its Progress down to the Death of Lord

Raglan, a lengthy and detailed account, was being published slowly

over a period of twenty-four years.156 This gave both public and

government much to contemplate, and from 1870 Edward Cardwell,

Secretary of State for War, set about his reforms in an attempt to

“buy back its own army from its own officers”, urged on by Liberal

member of parliament, Charles Trevelyan.157 Florence Nightingale’s

work, too, had continued on her return from Scutari as she set up the

Nightingale Training School for nurses with money raised by public

subscription and published her highly influential Notes on

Nursing.158 At the same time, John Bell (1811-95) sculpted his

Crimean memorial to the Guards, sited centrally at Waterloo Place,

London; Louis Desanges’ series of paintings of Victoria Cross

winners had been exhibited at the Sydenham Crystal Palace in the 154 Butler, 1993: 80. She writes that her father had shaken his head and averred that the Crimea was “forgotten” whilst her mother had “shivered at the idea of the snow”. 155 Butler, 1993: 80; L’Indépendence Belge, 11 June 1876, HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 10a “[a]nd one feels profoundly moved to see that a nation can, after twenty one years, still preserve the memory of those who died for its glory so present, so poignant”. (my translation). It is striking that here the journalist refers to the glory of war. 156 From 1863-87; Butler met and “had a comparatively long talk” with Kinglake in 1874, Butler, 1993: 86. 157 Lalumia, 1984: 133 citing the then Prime Minister, William Gladstone; Charles Trevelyan and his son George conducted a campaign for army reform in the late 1860s until Cardwell’s reforms became law in 1871, Lalumia, 1983: 43; Sam Beeton’s book Our Heroes of the Victoria Cross complemented the exhibition by Louis Desanges (1822-87) of fifty oil paintings featuring the winners of the Victoria Cross. 158 This was published in 1859.

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1860s and 1870s, and Alfred Tennyson, author of the influential

poem Charge of the Light Brigade, was still poet laureate.159

As a child, Butler’s father, besides teaching her to shoot, swim and

play billiards, had read stirring episodes from history to her as she

sketched soldiers and horses.160 After the rejection of her religious

painting The Magnificat (1869-70) (Church of St Wilfrid, Ventnor,

Isle of Wight) by the Royal Academy in 1871, Butler reverted to her

love of military themes, musing as to why this should be, given the

lack of army personnel in the Thompson family.161 Notwithstanding

her expressed early interest in Waterloo, a subject she was to paint

repeatedly on subsequent occasions, Butler, somewhat surprisingly,

chose an unidentifiable scene from the Crimean War for her

commission from Galloway, a roll call in winter. Her focus is on a

pathetic straggle of ordinary soldiers, members of the grenadier

guards, as they struggle to rally to a muster in the blood-stained

snow, but are emotionally and physically unable to perform. Butler

had judged the newly aroused public interest in the army to

perfection, demonstrating the “essential relationship between the

aesthetic character of a people’s work of visual art and that nation’s

social, moral, and ethical character” of the instant, and the appeal of

her representation was immediate.162 This was amply evidenced by

the overwhelming response at the Royal Academy when a policeman

was required to hold back the crowds. Huzzahs greeted the painting

as it was selected for a prime position on the line by the hanging

committee who threw their hats enthusiastically in the air; the Prince

of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge singled it out in their speeches

at the Academy banquet, and it was taken firstly to Buckingham 159 Bell’s statue was erected initially in 1861 at precisely the time Butler “migrated back to London”, Butler, 1993: 8; Butler went to meet Tennyson in July 1876 at his invitation, Butler, 1993: 124. 160 Her childhood sketchbooks are almost entirely devoted to military and equine themes. 161 Butler, 1993: 36, who appears to have overlooked the fact that her paternal grandfather, John Hamilton Thompson was Adjutant of the 11th Middlesex (St George’s) Rifle Volunteer Corps, and it is possible that Butler may have witnessed some of the Corps’ manoeuvres, Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 49. 162 Preziosi, 1992: 368, discussing the Fogg Art Museum.

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Palace, then later to Windsor Castle to show to the Tsar and to the

sickbed of Florence Nightingale, before being paraded around the

country under the banner “The Roll is coming”, where thousands

queued to see it.163 Two hundred and fifty thousand carte-de-visite

photographs of the artist were circulated, prints were reproduced and

Butler, now known as “Roll-Call Thompson”, became famous

overnight.164

Supremely conscious of the human form in her painting, Butler at the

same time recognised the psychological impact of war on the soldiers

and the interface between mind and body. For her, whilst the body

was the canvas upon which the physical wounds were represented, it

was the opportunity which those bodies, their gestures and their

facial expressions, afforded her in her psychological representations

which set her apart from her contemporaries.165 Seemingly situated

firmly within the narrative and didactic tradition of academic history

painting, she nevertheless managed to subvert that tradition by

introducing a new dimension to this genre in her focus on subjects

not previously represented for their heroism. By addressing current

problematic issues of death and injury in an understated approach to

battle, more normally infused with furious activity and colour, “the

usual plunging horses”, Butler distanced herself from earlier British

battle painting, dressing her soldiers in greys and blacks, with the

occasional patch of red, all warlike activity spent.166 Described as

“an absurdly easy picture” by an unspecified fellow artist, the Roll

163 Butler, 1993: 83-88, 93; Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 29. The original of the letter from J.R.Herbert of the hanging committee who proposed the round of huzzahs can still be seen in the Meynell family archives, HHG: (uncatalogued). The painting travelled inter alia to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and to Liverpool where twenty thousand people saw it within three weeks. 164 Butler, 1993: 88; Frederick Leighton, soon to be President of the Royal Academy was somewhat put out by the way the crowds, when viewing the Roll Call, jostled his own two paintings hung alongside and wrote to complain, RAA/Sec/82/3; Butler (known then as Thompson) was aware of this and wondered what Leighton thought of “that girl”, Butler, 1993: 90. 165 It was not until 1847 that students in the Royal Academy Painting School started to paint heads from the living model so as to study expression, many years after their French equivalent, Morris, 2005: 30. 166The Athenaeum, 17 November 1855.

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Call was widely praised for “its plain manly heroic truth,” its

“earnest honesty”, and the “wonderful variety in expression of the

maimed and wounded men”, highlighted by their close and equal

positioning to the picture plane.167

The scene shows the grenadier guards lining up for the roll call, the

“butcher’s bill”, after a bloody engagement.168 Several soldiers are

wounded; one lies dead or faint in the snow, others are missing, as

the sergeant, his head bandaged, ticks off the names of the survivors.

Together with the sergeant, we are led along the line to inspect the

exhausted remains of the once proud regiment. The composition is

essentially flat, almost in the nature of a narrative frieze, with its

echoes of a timeless classicism, the signs of ongoing battle visible

against the distant hills. The sky is heavy with snow, broken only by

a skein of sinister birds hovering in wait for carrion, while in the

immediate foreground lies the debris of battle, here an abandoned

helmet, there a spent cannon-ball, flotsam and jetsam thrown up in

the wreckage. The gentle rise and fall of the horizon resembles a

wave linked by the gestures of the men, their hands, the inclinations

of their heads, even their muskets. It is painted in sombre, subdued

browns and greys as befits the mood and with scarcely a hint of

regimental finery. The solitary officer, head bowed, sits mounted to

the extreme left of the canvas, almost as an afterthought, and

contributes little to the dynamic of the representation.

By their respective focus on working-class subjects, as with Leech, it

is tempting to draw a comparison between Butler’s “dark battalion”

and the 1852-63 painting Work by Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) in

which the labourer assumes heroic proportions. Madox Brown

represents his subject as “the external embodiment of manliness that

the boxer had been to an earlier generation”, and where, as with

Butler’s soldier, the “civilizing end” to which his “energies were 167 Butler, 1993: 81; the Times, 2 May 1874; Morning Post, 7 May 1874; Usherwood, 1992: 167. 168 Wilcox, 2000: 127.

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directed and the all-consuming purity of his labour elevated his

stature”.169 Both paintings show hard-working, committed men; in

Butler’s case even unto the point of death, and both show a novel

reverence for previously unsung heroes. It is no coincidence, too,

that Luke Fildes (1847-1927) exhibited his popular Applicants for

Admission to a Casual Ward (fig. 26) at the Royal Academy in 1874,

the same year as the Roll Call, showing a desolate presentation of the

destitute queuing outside the workhouse in similar linear format, and

which was described by a neat circularity in military terms in the Art

Journal as a “wretched troop”.170

There is nothing glorious here about this conflict in which death is

seen to be banal and futile, a representation approved by the critics as

well as the public and Butler was “praised for not shying away from

the terrible havoc of war”.171 The Art Journal commended her

restraint in allowing the “misery that is already great enough” to

speak for itself, eschewing a “display of sentiment” and a “number of

pathetic incidents – very “pretty” perhaps, but without the force of

truth”.172 Instead of representing identifiable society individuals,

these are anonymous, ordinary men, bonded by a shared experience,

the older soldiers looking out for the younger, and it is their passive

stoicism which elevates them to heroic status. Where the army had

essentially dehumanised these men by imposing a military

conformity of dress and drill, Butler invested her troops with

distinctive personalities and emotions, separating her presenting

subject-matter from what is actually being represented.173 More than

that, Butler had brought a magnifying lens to a distant scene,

allowing the spectator minutely to examine male suffering at a time

169 Celina Fox cited in Cordulack, 2003: 557. 170 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 33; Fildes’ work had first appeared in the inaugural edition of the Graphic on 4 December 1869 under the title Hungry and Homeless, accompanying an article on the 1864 Houseless Poor Act; Lalumia, too, regards the simultaneous exhibition of these two paintings as more than coincidental. Lalumia, 1984: 152. 171 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 33. 172 Art Journal, June 1874: 163-64. 173 See Joseph, 1986: 65-71; Fer, 1994: 27.

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when women artists were expected to focus rather on a more

feminine domestic narrative. Although painterly and with great

attention to detail, in the Roll Call Butler had subverted tradition by

fixing the focus on the ordinary participants, men who had

previously been viewed as little more than riff-raff and who in her

hands became noble, “heroes whom the islands that had given them

birth knew little of, or cared little for, until here”.174 This was

acclaimed by public, critics and fellow artists alike as a radical

departure for high art, and a departure led, of all things, by a woman.

“Place aux dames!” wrote the art critic of the Illustrated London

News [t]his is one of the most remarkable pictures within our recollection. The subject is the very last we should expect from a female pencil, by force of imaginative sympathy the terrible havoc of war is realised with a vraisemblance that could only be expected from an eye-witness.175

It was a departure for which Butler received praise for allying herself

“in aims and method” to the innovative French military painters,

Alphonse de Neuville (1835-85) and Detaille, with their “intense

detail and their concern with the painful, mundane and apparently

inglorious aspects of military life”, just at a time when history

painting was not so well regarded in Britain.176 That she was so

successful in this is evidenced by Meissonier’s comment that

“L’Angleterre n’a guère qu’un peintre militaire, c’est une femme.”177

Nearer home, the public was reminded by the critic of the Newcastle

Chronicle that “England has never had a great and powerful school

174 A description of the soldiers in Butler’s painting Inkerman, Catalogue of Paintings by Lady Butler, 1877: 4. 175 ILN 9 May 1874; see also the Times, 2 May 1874, the Graphic, May 1874 and the Morning Post, 7 May, 1874. 176 Oldcastle, 1879: 258, who refers to Detaille and de Neuville as having recently “revolutionised military painting” by transforming military painting from “the most conventional, heartless, insincere and inhuman of arts” to “the most human, the most intensely true, the most realistic”. This lack of regard in British art persisted notwithstanding the burgeoning increase of academic entries on a military theme; see Hichberger, 1988: 82 and Morris, 2005: 105. 177 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 163, who provide the following translation, “England really has only one military painter-a woman.”

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of battle painters”, contrasting the energetic representations of the

French and German artists.178 Butler may have eschewed their “wild

roar and crash”, but she had captured the imagination and the mood

of the time.179 As testament to her popularity, the Fine Art Society

paid £13,500 to the Roll Call subscription list in 1876, followed by a

further £3,000 to Butler for the copyright of her 1877 painting,

Return from Inkerman, £2,500 for Scotland for Ever! (1881) and

£1,500 for The Remnants of an Army: Jellalabad, January 13th, 1842

(1879).180

When Butler exhibited Balaclava in 1876, she was too late for the

Royal Academy Exhibition, and had to fall back on a private gallery

at the Fine Art Society, which had the advantage of showcasing her

work on its own. In the face of her own disappointment in the

picture, she writes that, at the private view, “there was what may be

called a sensation. Virginia Gabriel, the composer, was led out of the

room by her husband in tears”.181 In a particularly evocative

comment, the critic of the Shields Daily News wrote that “[i]t is not

often that the smoke of battle is rolled back with so powerful a hand

as to make the human sentiment visible”.182 When looking at

Balaclava, the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the central

standing figure of a young hussar, having lost his horse, staring

straight out of the canvas (fig.27). His uniform is torn, revealing a

white, but bloodied shirt, the blood staining his front cross band over

his heart. In his right hand he carries his sword, bloodied at the tip

and hanging limply downwards as he clenches his fist firmly round a

clump of grass. This is not a figure attempting to engage the viewer;

instead, he epitomises catatonic trauma, not seeing, not touching, not

178 HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 16. 179 HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 16. 180 Information from the Fine Art Society Minute Book, cited in Springhall, 1986: 67. 181 Butler, 1993: 121. 182 The Shields Daily News 22 August 1876. This review was written during the painting’s tour of the country, when, it is said that “there has been a great competition among the principal towns of the kingdom for the honour of its first appearance in the provinces.” Tablet, HHG, T.E.Wellers scrapbook: 14.

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hearing and not feeling.183 Although he is surrounded in silent

support by his fellow survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade,

all leaning slightly in towards him, he himself is isolated, mentally

and physically. His expression is one of extreme incomprehension

and shock. He is as far removed from his colleagues – and the viewer

– as if he were in a nightmare, deprived of even that most basic of

human comforts, touch, at the most critical of times, a time when, as

Gus Sivertz recollected of a World War One bombardment, “it’s

terrible to be alone”, for this is precisely when “you want to touch

someone”.184

Significantly, while Balaclava was almost universally acclaimed in

the press, the Morning Post calling it “to our thinking, far and away

the best work she has as yet produced” and the Scarborough Gazette

praising the “still hot excitement with which the canvas almost

breathes”, Pennington, himself a survivor of the Charge but now an

actor and model for the central figure, was roundly criticised.185 He

was panned by the Manchester Critic for being “theatrical – not

dramatic – simply ruinously obtrusive and unreal.”186 Certainly, his

presentation is very different to the restrained acceptance of the

guards in the Roll Call, and as Usherwood and Spencer-Smith

comment, “it was thought that he also bore disturbing signs of having

suffered some kind of mental derangement in the fray”, a

representation that the Victorian critics found too realistic and

unacceptable for their taste.187 Such comments, I suggest, indicate

the level of comprehension of the Victorian audience to whom the

concept of post-traumatic stress disorder was completely unknown

and unimagined. Butler was offering a new insight into the military

world, a world where soldiers were actually killed and suffered

183 Similar to Don McCullin’s “one thousand yard stare” cited in Black, 2010: 26. 184 A soldier’s comment after the battle at Vimy Ridge in World War One cited by Das, 2005: 83. 185 HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 7 and 22. 186 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 65; see Booth, 1981: 1-29 for a discussion of the links between the theatre and painting. 187 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 65.

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agonising injuries, where their splendid uniforms were horrifyingly

bloodied, and could be seen to be bloodied, their colourful pennants

torn to shreds, and where their minds were disturbed. Not all were so

condemnatory of Butler’s central figure, however, with the Daily

Telegraph describing him as “noteworthy” and “most powerful in

conception, in attitude, in expression”, and even given his mental

isolation, capable of evoking compassion.188

Pennington apart, praise in the press was practically universal, the

Daily Mail commenting that the painting’s “art merits are great and it

has what every truly great pictorial tragedy has – a profound moral

and depth of pathos not utterable in words”, while the Morning Post

lyrically referred to it as “a poem in colours [. . .] not undeserving of

equal rank with the Laureate’s famous ode”.189 In the event, Gabriel

was not the only one to weep, for Balaclava was said to move both

men and women to tears, a reaction previously provoked by the Roll

Call, Butler recording in her autobiography that “Col. Lloyd

Lindsay, of Alma fame, and his wife were wild to have The Roll

Call. She shyly told me she had cried before the picture.”190 Her

fellow artist, Frederick Goodall (1822-1906), clearly appreciated the

emotive power of Butler’s work, referring to the Roll Call in his own

autobiography as a “most touching picture” and “the only true battle-

picture that I can call to mind with a true sense of poetry in it”.191

But while Pennington is set apart, his fellow sufferers are not and the

spectator begins to see indications of a more intimate relationship

between the soldiers in their distress, disrupting more conventional

patterns of male behaviour and creating “an intensity of feeling

which friendship never touches”, an intensity produced by shared

trauma, in what Sarah Cole has described as a “highly visible 188 Daily Telegraph, 2 May 1876, which acknowledged that he was regarded by some as “melodramatic” and “far too Byronic”, an attribute subsequently heralded by W.E.Henley in his poetry, Attridge, 2003: 119. 189 11 October 1876, HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 24, 7. 190 Butler, 1993: 87. 191 Goodall, 1902: 368.

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reconfiguration of male communities”.192 Just as in sporting

activities where “normatively homophobic sportsmen have engaged

in blatantly homoerotic activities” such as cuddling and kissing, war

has fragmented that peculiarly male attribute of physical distance, of

bravado, of “manliness”, by its full frontal assault on the body,

leaving in its wake a novel affect of vulnerability, a vulnerability

which leads to both the need for, and the ability to trust those who

are neither family, nor even friends, but fellow soldiers.193 These

men are part of that “imagined community” which has been thrown

together in the national interest in a “deep, horizontal comradeship”

which “makes it possible [. . .] not so much to kill, as willingly to

die” together.194 They are at the extremity of life in the midst of war,

and it is this, in what Santanu Das in his literary criticism of poetry

and war has termed the “perilous intimacy of the moment” which

enables them in their extremis to reach out to virtual strangers.195

In an eerie precursor to Sargent’s 1919 painting Gassed (fig.28), a

dragoon in the middle distance of the painting epitomises this urgent

need to trust. His jacket stained red, and with a bloodied bandage

over his eyes as if blind, he reaches forward helplessly, both hands

hovering uncertainly above a fellow dragoon who is bending forward

over his dying white horse (fig.29).196 Slightly in front, two more

dragoons stand side by side, (fig.30) one gently holding a rag over

the chest wound of his fellow soldier, who places his own hand on

top and whose white shirt throws the red of his blood into stark

relief.197 At the precise moment when touch replaces words, his 192 Cole, 2007: 7. 193 Craik, 1994: 192. 194 Anderson, 2006: 7, whose analysis is in marked contrast to Clausewitz’s remark that the purpose of the soldier is first to injure the enemy, cited in Scarry, 1985: 65; see also Bourke, 1996:1. 195 Das, 2005: 7,130, citing W.A.Quinton’s unpublished memoirs. 196 I have not been able to find any reference confirming that Sargent had seen Balaclava, but it is tempting to speculate that this is the case, as he moved to London in 1886 by which time he had already submitted some of his works to the Royal Academy; see also Das, 2005: 1-3. 197 Butler, 1993: 121, where she writes how she was told that “after the stress of Inkermann a soldier had come up to his horse and leant his face against it exactly as I have the man doing.”

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comrade solicitously holds his jacket over his left arm whilst his

right lightly embraces the injured soldier’s right shoulder.198 To the

front of the canvas, another hussar is sitting with a vacant, shocked

expression, staring at the ground over his bloody hands, his left

trouser leg ragged, while to his rear, yet another hussar, with

bloodshot eyes, leans forward dramatically, one open palm

outstretched, imploringly, as with the other he grasps the reins of his

horse. A mounted sergeant looks on, leaning forward in his saddle,

his hand open, gesturing towards the central figure almost in

supplication. At first sight, he looks unharmed, but on closer

examination, one boot is red and his horse’s hoof is dripping blood.

Another lancer, exhausted, rests his head and hands on the side of the

horse, too weary to stand unaided.

Although somewhat subdued, the recurrence of red blood throughout

the painting is significant, Butler’s sister, writing in 1896 that [r]ed has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited and published or indeed, if red is the colour of life, it is only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and waste.199

It is tempting indeed to think of the sisters discussing this issue as Butler

was painting Dawn of Waterloo between 1893 and 1895, Butler using red

not just as the colour of the soldier’s uniform, though she clearly enjoyed

the “dazzling spectacle” of the Queen’s Review at Aldershot where her

“eyes positively ached with all that scarlet and gold”, but also as the

colour of injury, violence and death, echoing her sister’s trenchant

observation of the colour’s ambivalent signification.200 In one of the very

few adverse comments voiced in 1876, she had been criticised by the

Globe for “an unnecessary amount of blood in the picture”.201 Contrasting

Butler’s gender and youth with the theme of her works, Tim Wilcox

198 Das, 2005: 24. 199 Flint, 2000:109. 200 Butler, 1993: 186-87. 201 HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 7.

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argues that it “was largely this disjuncture between the art and the artist –

the invention of a new role by Thompson – around which her fame was

constructed”.202 Although Wilcox here is referring to her youth and

gender, I suggest that, similarly, Butler never quite resolved the

contradiction within herself between her competing feelings of

compassion and almost ferocious excitement. While she actively sought

to avoid the portrayal of actual conflict, Butler could not refrain from an

appreciation of the erotic frisson of military display, epitomised by her

comments on the battlefield at Waterloo, where “that lurid glamour glows

around it” and we “see through its blood-red veil of smoke”.203

To the right of Balaclava’s central figure, a mounted lancer clasps

the dead trumpeter to his chest, almost maternally as a pietà (fig.31),

as he bears him tenderly home, his hands overlapping as they

emphasise the tiny body in his arms. Here Butler may well have been

influenced by the account of Nathaniel Steevens, a witness to the

bombardment of the Russians’ rifle pits, who wrote of the death of “a

great pet” of the Colonel who “though wounded snatched him up in

his arms and carried him off declaring ‘they shall never take my

child’”, in just such an exhibition of great tenderness.204 The

trumpeter’s instrument is clearly visible, a counter-reference to the

sounds of battle, now silenced. At the lancer’s side, a livid white

horse carries his slumped rider back, guided by a dragoon grasping

the reins. To their right, a second dragoon, near collapse, is leaning

back, his face wan, his eyes closed as his horse bears him up over the

hill to safety, whilst behind, another, riderless, horse struggles to

keep up. Slightly to the rear, and less well defined, a mounted soldier

is encouraging the stragglers home, his sword in the air pointing the

way. Behind him, to both right and left can be seen the weary groups

of men and horses, some still negotiating their way through the

“valley of death”, littered with animal and human corpses and

202 Wilcox, 2000: 129. 203 Butler, 1993: 29. 204 Figes, 2011: 361.

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punctuated by gunsmoke. In the air above, birds, possibly crows,

possibly vultures, circle. At the extreme front right of the canvas lies

a dead soldier, having yielded up his body as the ultimate weapon of

war.205

Across the painting, the emphasis is on physical contact between the

men, with the hand appearing as a “recurring trope”, much as it does

in the memoirs of the nurses in military hospitals.206 These soldiers

are seen not simply as victims of violence, but also, unusually, as

carers of their fellow men, a role traditionally ascribed to women, in

a blurring of genders, with an oblique reference to Butler’s own

femininity. The obvious suffering of the men throws into sharp relief

the power of war to invert social norms, just as Butler herself

disrupts society’s cultural conditioning by revealing an unusual

intensity of feeling in her painting, exposing a hidden world to a

public audience. The unspoken question is whether the public would

truly consent to war if they really understood such awful

consequences, a question readily understood by the critic of the

Daily Telegraph who felt that Balaclava “must extort the very

highest commendations from persons of the Peace Society way of

thinking”.207 The Peace Society concurred, as it is known to have

requested Butler to use her “talents so that the false nature of the

glory of war might not be stimulated”.208 Butler readily agreed.

The drama of Balaclava is emphasised by the use of dark colouring,

greys, browns, rust, deep red, highlighted only by the white shirt of

the injured soldier, and set against a pale sky, almost as if in ghostly

silhouette. It is a precise and detailed painting and one which it is

necessary to interrogate closely in order to study the individual

characters whose expressions and gestures speak of their endurance. 205 Scarry, 1985: 83. 206 Das, 2005: 1, 26. 207 The Daily Telegraph, 2 May 1876. 208 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 23, citing the Morning Post, 4 May 1875. There was some dissent, however, among the members of the Peace Society, some believing her paintings “gave éclat to war.”

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The effect is to draw in the viewer in an intimate manner and to

encourage empathy with the unnamed soldiers, from the post-

traumatic stress syndrome of the central character, to the motherly

tenderness of the mounted lancer, to the dead soldier lying on the

cold earth. As the Globe recorded “[t]here is not a head without

expression or an attitude without significance”.209 This is not a

painting about the glory of war, of glamour or patriotism. On the

contrary, by highlighting the physical gestures and expressions of the

men, Butler has drawn attention to their unenviable plight. During

her nursing experiences in the First World War, Mary Borden wrote

that “war was a thing to be endured” and as Butler shows us, these

were the soldiers who did endure, and “[y]ou can read on their heavy

jowls, in their stupefied, patient hopeless eyes, how boring it is to be

a hero”.210 In this, Balaclava is inordinately powerful.

Clearly Butler had presented new perspectives in military art and had

responded to contemporary concerns about war. But while there is

empathy, it is questionable whether Butler truly encapsulated the

total experience of the soldiers – the fear, the anxiety, the pain and

the horror. It is one thing to be part of a “burgeoning anti-aristocratic

discourse”, but quite another to step into the shoes of the troops on

the front line.211 As the Illustrated London News had noted, Butler

had neither witnessed battle action, nor ever experienced what Das

has called “the unshareability of the ordeal”, never endured such

privations, never felt pain such as the troops had.212 While the issue

of pain was becoming more widely discussed in the mid-nineteenth

century, especially following the use of chloroform in childbirth by

Queen Victoria in 1853, this addressed the possibility of relief, rather

than of the experience itself.213 Even if Butler had personally

suffered, such experiences are ephemeral and difficult to 209 HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 7. 210 Borden, 1929: 2. 211 Hichberger, 1988: 77. 212 Das, 2005: 192. 213 Anaesthestic relief was available the following year in the Crimea but woefully underused on the grounds that pain was a necessary stimulant.

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reproduce.214 When ill, it is notoriously difficult to describe or

precisely locate the pain felt; how much more difficult, therefore, if

not impossible, to represent such pain whether in literature, music or

painting.215 For Elaine Scarry, pain is of a very peculiar quality and

is beyond imagining.216 It is, she suggests, not an event, but a

condition and has no object; it simply is. It is peculiar to each

individual and therefore locked away in that body as a unique

experience.

Jacques Rancière, in his work, The Future of the Image, argues that

if an event or situation is possible to imagine, then the very act of

imagining renders it capable of representation.217 Difficult though it

is to put oneself in the position of another in pain, I argue, along with

Rancière, that the power of imagination is such as to sufficiently

bridge the gap between spectator and sufferer to facilitate, at the very

least, a partial visual representation. How far that representation truly

gives effect to the event, only the sufferer can say. Just as we cannot

really know what another person is thinking, so we can never really

know what he or she is feeling. Thus, while the presenting image of

war itself, the erotic glamour and excitement of the charge, may be

both “irresistible and picturesque”, notwithstanding common threads

of understanding the precise nature of pain is so far beyond a shared

comprehension that “even the artist [. . . ] ordinarily falls silent”.218

In a period during which her fellow battle artist, Woodville, was

illustrating an autobiography expressing the view that “natives do not

feel pain as we do”, Butler was the first British military painter to

portray clearly a sense of the violation of the individual, and

214 See Bolingbroke explaining the pain of banishment to his father “O who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking of the frosty Caucasus/Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite/By bare imagination of a feast?” William Shakespeare, King Richard the Second, Act 1, Scene 3. 215 See, for example Eric Lomax who writes “I was in such pain I could not begin to locate its source.” Lomax, 2014: 142. 216 Scarry, 1985: 162. 217 Rancière, 2003: 138. 218 Scarry, 1985: 43, 10.

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ordinary, soldiers’ bodies, and a sharp awareness of their pain and

distress.219 In Balaclava and the Roll Call, (as later in Dawn of

Waterloo) she draws compassionate attention to the soldiers’ mutual

interdependence in a manner which her gender may well have made

more possible. Her paintings displaced the public experience of

artistic representations of soldiers as romantic, “manly”, and

physically untouched, by these more realistic, but truly heroic and

suffering troops. In Wilfrid Meynell’s words for the Art Journal of

1898 “she has exposed the horror of the slaughter by simply

centralising it; she has given to the victim of war the single

personality that has its appeal to all others of the human family”.220

Thus whilst it may well be impossible to render pain exactly in paint,

Butler has shown that it is nevertheless possible to engender

empathy, so that even if her “images cannot possibly encompass

most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital

function”.221 In these early works, showcasing the conflict in the

Crimea, her vision was, at the very least, surprising in privileging

suffering over glamour, and in avoiding what Margaret Higonnet has

termed the “seduction of battle heroics”.222

Outwardly, with her upper middle-class life-style and privileges,

Butler may be thought of as belonging to that set of late nineteenth-

century artists who were “complicit with the social values of the

dominant culture”, but in the visual representation of her concerns, I

argue that she provides an important example of how art expresses

the “experience of the processes and conditions of modernisation” of

contemporary life.223 In her empathy for the individual at a time of

army reform and a move towards democratisation, her paintings

articulate that sense of humanity which I suggest forms part of a

trajectory, linking the artwork of the second half of the nineteenth

219 Stewart, 1924: 106. 220 Art Journal, 1898: 31. 221 Armstrong, 2006: 104; Sontag, 2003: 102. 222 Higonnet, 1993: 200. 223 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 7, 3.

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century to that of the First World War. One only has to look, for

example, at Kennington’s The Kensingtons at Laventie (1916)

(fig.32), to recognise a common theme in the dull expressions of the

soldiers as, exhausted, they return to base. Described as a “highly

democratic image” in its focus on the “bravest and best [. . .]

regardless of rank”, Kennington’s painting can be seen as connecting

to Butler’s overarching concerns for the common soldier.224 The

weather, as in the Roll Call, is wintry; there is one man collapsed or

dead in the snow.225 The men are soberly dressed in dark uniform,

the debris of war displayed. One soldier rests on his rifle, much as

his Crimean counterpart uses his musket for support. Most are

absorbed in their own thoughts. What is different is the distinct lack

of physical engagement between Kennington’s soldiers, a device

taken up later by Sargent in his painting, Gassed.226

I am not arguing for a direct line of “influence” between Butler’s

representations of the soldier and those by artists later on in the

nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Rather, the purpose of

this chapter is to re-establish Butler’s much overlooked paintings

within a framework of British military art. Instead of viewing her

primarily as an anomaly as a female war artist, as is frequently the

case with Butler, I have reconnected her work to mid-Victorian

visual cultures of war exhibited across the walls of the Royal

Academy, into specially designed panoramic rotunda and the pages

of the illustrated press. Her contribution was, as I have argued, a

significant one and her focus on the depiction of individual pain and

suffering paved the way for more graphic representations of the

horrors of mechanised warfare to come.

224 Richard Slocombe, Senior Art Curator, IWM, the Telegraph, 30 August 2013. 225 See Black, 2013: 6 who writes that the Gallery exhibiting Kennington’s work confirmed that his soldier was not dead. 226 Touch was subsequently explored by Kennington in his sculpture, 24th Infantry Division Memorial (1924), where two of the three soldiers do hold hands.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE ‘BOHEMIAN WITH A BRUSH’: RICHARD CATON WOODVILLE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES227

Art has no home amongst the horrors of realism or of carnage. The warrior needs no reminders of these.228

Following the conflict in the Crimea, Britain was not involved in

another war involving a population of broadly European origin until

the very end of the century, even though the British army was

engaged almost continuously in Africa and Asia throughout this

period. By the time of the Second Boer War in 1899, a new visual

vocabulary for military painting had emerged, displacing the

emphasis on the more empathetic effects of war on the soldier and

his family as portrayed by Butler and some of the genre painters, and

which had hitherto dominated the second half of the nineteenth

century. Nor had any topographical paintings of battlefields been

accepted by the Royal Academy since the 1860s, possibly as a

consequence of the introduction of, and increasing reliance upon,

photography for military dispositions.229 Queen Victoria, who had

declared the Crimean War to be “popular beyond belief”, and

Russell, in his admiration for the individual soldier, had done much

to heighten the British public’s awareness and appreciation of the

military.230 As the nineteenth century progressed, the reassuring role

of the army, for example, following the Indian Uprising of 1857,

coupled with a growing perception of the troops as Christian

soldiers, further enhanced its profile; so much so, that even pacifist

“Quakers were caught up in the flood of volunteers for the colours”

at the outbreak of the Boer War.231

227 The Times, 22 August 1927. 228 Art Journal, Christmas No.1900: 340; Carter, 1900: 30. 229 Hichberger, 1988: 97. 230 Paris, 2000: 32. 231 Summers, 1976: 107, citing as her source “personal information”, alongside a reference to George F. Shee’s work, The Briton’s First Duty, published in 1901 in which he writes as a Quaker that “pacifism was not quite in the central trunk of our teaching, though an important part of it”.

80

The perceived eighteenth-century dilemma of a growing effeminacy,

of a “foppishness and Frenchification” of the British male, had been

countered, partially at least, by displays of military painting by such

artists as John Trumbull (1756-1843) and John Singleton Copley

(1738-1815) in their representations of the controlled aggression of

British naval commanders during the Great Siege of Gilbraltar

(1779-83).232 The officer class was no longer portrayed as the

somewhat effete “toast and butter captains”, but instead exhibited

that restrained and chivalrous reserve, characteristic of the “ideal”

male of the latter part of the nineteenth century, while the ordinary

troops “had since the Crimean War been promoted as the

embodiment of Christian heroism”.233

This was a period, as Joanna de Groot has observed, when

“manliness and empire confirmed one another, guaranteed one

another, enhanced one another”, a period when military art was

enjoying a greater recognition with its capacity for almost aggressive

propaganda precisely as the expected easy victory of a so-called

superior nation in a mere “war in a tea-cup” was catastrophically

denied.234 The lack of topographical works notwithstanding, entries

of battle paintings to the Royal Academy increased during the last

quarter of the nineteenth century and the walls were hung with works

by artists whose names have now been almost forgotten, artists such

as Crofts, Charlton, Giles, Wollen and Woodville. Pre-existing

notions of what constituted historical works of art were further

challenged by the nature of the conflict in South Africa where the 232 This was a decisive victory for the British towards the end of the American Revolutionary War. I am indebted to Cicely Robinson for allowing me to read her paper Conflicts of Conduct: British Masculinity and Military Painting in the Wake of the Siege of Gibraltar in advance of anticipated publication. It is ironic that the British believed the French to be both more effeminate and bloodthirsty at the same time. 233 Rogers, 2004: 241; Cunningham, 1981: 24. This does not mean that anxiety over effeminacy was completely expunged; see for example Willcock, 2013: 176 where he refers to concerns over the feminisation of the imperial body in his discussion of Valentine Prinsep’s 1880 painting The Imperial Assemblage held at Delhi, 1 January, 1877. 234 De Groot, 2006: 56; the second quotation is taken from Pakenham, 1992: 110, citing The Times, 9-10 October 1899.

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enemy, with its unexpected and novel tactics, was hardly ever to be

seen. No longer a war with customary panoramic scenes and glaring

regimental colours, this was a conflict that soon proved to be one

which war artists struggled to represent and one where they strove,

nevertheless, to encapsulate the relationship of empire, manliness

and contemporary ideas shaped by military exploits in any

meaningful way. Their focus shifted instead to a representation of the

British soldier behaving well in adversity and away from both the

more pathetic and stoical acceptance of Butler’s militaristic failures.

The British troops had gone off to war on a wave of enthusiasm to

parallel that at the beginning of the Crimean War, the Daily Mail

reporting that the “chorus of cheers” at departure seemed never-ending, and at Waterloo all semblance of military order had disappeared. The police were swept aside and the men were borne, in many cases, shoulder high to the entraining platform.235

The significance of the station’s name will not have gone unnoticed

and the public, high on a wave of excited anticipation, expected to

see early pictorial evidence of British success from the many war

illustrators and artists, both at home and at the front. War

correspondent Bennet Burleigh (1840-1914) expressed the widely

held view in 1899 that the Boer Republic, “once the troops secured a

foothold upon its spacious plains would be easily and quickly

overrun” and it “was only the ignorant burghers of the remote

districts” who had the temerity to “sniff in scorn at the idea of

England attempting to oppose their arms”.236 Whereas the Boers

believed that they were fighting for their very existence as a nation,

with a “fixed determination to fight to the bitter end if once we start”,

many of the British public agreed with the Prime Minister, Lord

Salisbury, that they were in South Africa to show that they, “not the

Dutch, are boss”.237 Although some liberal voices, such as that of

235 Cited by Wilkinson-Latham, 1979: 250. 236 Burleigh, 1900: 5, 2. 237 Pall Mall Gazette, 18 December 1900; Searle, 2004: 274.

82

J.A.Hobson, had been raised in opposition, the general opinion

followed that of Ruskin, who supported imperial expansion “in so far

as it was spiritually elevating for the English”.238 The British, it was

believed, were the disseminators of enlightened and morally

enriching government and as long as they remained the dominant

nation, all would be well both at home and abroad. As expressed by

Mark Girouard in his study of chivalry, one of the consequences of

imperialism had been “to imbue very large numbers of people with a

religious belief in Britain as the great force for good in the world”.239

It was virtually unthinkable that Britain could be in the wrong and

their so-called natural talent for ruling what Kipling called ‘lesser

breeds’ carried a corresponding duty to do so, and to do so well.240

Major-General George Younghusband put this view succinctly when

he said that “[t]here is perhaps no nation on earth which has come

under British rule and guidance which has not benefited from it”.241

On the ground in South Africa, however, the soldiers were faced

with “guerilla tactics that bore no resemblance to the three-act drama

of the set-piece battle”, so that any notions of the glory of war were

abandoned, leaving in its place “just plain primeval killing, without

redemption”.242 As the British public soon came to realise, this was a

war which could not have been more pictorially different from its

Crimean predecessor with its fancy uniforms, bands and flags, a war

laid out dramatically on a stage before an appreciative (and

sometimes invited) audience in a construction, or even

reconstruction, of war as theatrical presentation.243 From the British

camp, the enemy in South Africa was scarcely to be sighted, dressed

in dull, everyday bush clothes, relying not on face-to-face 238 Ruskin, 1998: 16; Hobson’s argument is set out in his 1901 work, Imperialism. 239 Girouard, 1981: 281. 240 Girouard, 1981: 281; Farwell, 1981: 108; taken from Kipling’s poem Recessional; General Wolseley told his wife that he thanked God he was not an American, which in his view would have been worse than being a “colonial”, albeit white. 241 Farwell, 1981: 108. 242 Peck, 1998: 166, and 186, quoting Rudyard Kipling; the second quotation is from Searle, 2004: 303, quoting D. MacDonald. 243 Paris, 2000: 24.

83

confrontation, but instead on ambushes, sieges and long-distance

weaponry, an enemy using stealth and surprise, not “good honest

fighting”, leaving the British soldier with “the constant puzzle of

having nothing to fire at”.244 The Boers, it was said, were not playing

fair, and were ignoring the rules of the game, “contrary to the

conventions of civilised war”.245 It was a war the tactics for which

the British army was completely unprepared, with few accurate maps

and bereft of “reliable intelligence and thorough scouting”.246

Although British soldiers were reputed to be brave, as against an

enemy of European origin, with modern weapons on the South

African Veldt, their army’s tactics were comparatively ineffective.

Many of the officers maintained a parade ground mentality and little,

if anything, had been learned from previous experience.247

Nevertheless, the war continued to be extensively represented for the

popular art market through the publication of innumerable battle

sketches and costume studies reproduced in the illustrated press and

sold by printsellers, signalling the popularity of heroic military

images.248 It was as a result of this proliferation of visual culture that

the British public was once again able to follow a remote conflict in

all its graphic detail through photographs, drawings, paintings,

cartoons and even film.249 By now battle art had moved away from

the margins of the art world, owing perhaps to a wider audience for

and availability of such images, and possibly also to the fluid

transition between different genres of working artists, several of

whom turned to illustration alongside fine art as a means of steadier

income generation.250 The illustrated press demand for sketches from

the front was buoyant, while fast moving developments in

photography enabled individual soldiers to transmit their personal 244 Wilson, 1901: 449. 245 Attridge, 2003: 64; Wilson, 1901: 457. 246 Burleigh, 1900: 15, 87, 91. 247 Lee, 1985: 30. 248 Hichberger, 1988: 104; Paris, 2000: 19. 249 Hewison, 1989: 99. 250 Spielmann, in his article on Ernest Crofts, attributes his early lack of application to his independent means, Spielmann, 1901: 424; Harrington, 1993: 276.

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images home in ever increasing numbers, thereby making them

almost universally available. To complement these visual images, the

war was extensively followed in the popular culture of the music-

hall, that “fount of patriotism”, by offerings such as The Absent-

Minded Beggar by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), illustrated by

Woodville, and W.D.Cobb’s Goodbye Dolly Gray, with the

exhilarating encouragement, “it’s time to do and dare” for all those

would-be volunteers still at home.251

This chapter will examine the visual representations of the

relationship between war, military personnel and sport within the

wider context of the late nineteenth century, its imperialistic

propaganda and anxieties. At first sight it may appear as if the works

of this period were retrogressive, relying simply on the pleasures and

glorification of war, whilst ignoring its adverse effects, but I shall

argue how far their formal appearance belies their continuing focus

on the individual British soldier, his courage, his endurance, his

manliness alongside his adherence to the spirit of imperialist

Britain.252 In order to explore how artists responded to the challenge

of this new type of warfare, I shall examine the works of certain of

those battle artists who exhibited at the Royal Academy in the late

nineteenth century whilst at the same time providing the illustrated

press with some of its most stirring representations of the conflict.253

In particular, it will focus on the works of Richard Caton Woodville

whose prolific oeuvre continually straddled the spectrum of popular

and fine art. Whilst Hichberger remarks that his “credentials as an

academically trained artist were impeccable”, his approach to war art

largely reflected that adopted by him in his work for the illustrated

press, an approach described as his “death or glory” style, so much

so that it was said that his work represented “an artist’s victory over 251 Summerfield, 1986: 17, 36-37. These songs were also popular with the troops in the field; Pall Mall Gazette, 5 March 1900. 252 Hichberger, 1988: 115. 253 The exception to this is Ernest Crofts who did not work for the press.

85

many a British defeat”.254 Moving seamlessly between the two

genres, Woodville was both blamed and praised for his dashing

execution, critics variously referring to him as “careless” and

“pass[ing] little beyond the province of newspaper illustration”, an

observation which, according to Joseph Kestner, could apply equally

to many of his fellow battle-artists.255 Marion Spielmann found fault

with his canvasses, which he observed, “often seem less like pictures

than illustrations painted huge”.256 Woodville himself writes how,

early on in his career, he was heavily censured by the influential

critic, George Augustus Sala “who found fault with me for painting

with what he called ‘slap dash’, when I was so young an artist”.257

There is no doubt that speed was of the essence in producing press

illustrations especially after 1855 when the Illustrated London News

no longer had a monopoly. They were also time-consuming.

Drawings were produced initially by special artists, known as

“Specials”, sent out to the theatre of war by the press and printsellers.

Usually their works were drawn on very flimsy paper to allow for

easier tracing onto the woodblocks, which were then engraved for

reproduction in the press. Sometimes, for the larger, double page

spreads, as many as forty wood blocks were required and were

engraved by more than one artist.258 It was through these “Specials”

and their counterparts in Britain that the popular press did much to

remove war art, and especially contemporary war art, from its

elevated, and constricted position as history painting, and to make it

accessible to a wider audience.259 Military art had already largely

ceased to be regarded as history painting, and from the mid-

nineteenth century was increasingly being viewed as factual

representations of actual current events, highlighting contemporary

254 Hichberger, 1988: 95; Johnson, 1978: 15; Kestner, 1995: 194. 255 Hichberger, 1988: 95-96; Kestner, 1995: 194. 256 Spielmann, 1901: 423. 257 Woodville, 1914: 82. 258 Johnson, 1978: 12. 259 Greenwall, 1992: 11.

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issues and anxieties.260 This chapter will explore the artistic and

cultural context within which Woodville was practising as a war

artist and illustrator, paying particular attention to the presentation,

and perceived tension of the loose brushwork and rough finish in his

oil paintings, alongside the time pressured work made primarily for

newspapers.

Imperial Representations

Woodville was the posthumous son of an American artist, though

born and brought up in Britain.261 Early in life he had spent fifteen

years as a volunteer in the yeomanry, which he described as “much

fun, little work”, rising to the rank of captain, and had travelled

extensively, visiting the occasional theatre of war, though he never

personally experienced battle.262 His enthusiasm for the army led him

to design the uniforms and accoutrements of the Egyptian Army for

which he was awarded the Commandership of the Medjidieh.263 He

was known to move with a “fast bohemian set”, as “an indefatigable

rider to hounds, hunting much with the Garth, South Berkshire, the

Bucks and the now disbanded Queen’s staghounds”.264 He

accompanied Prince Albert Victor on a pig-sticking expedition into

Morocco, and said of himself that he had “taken toll of all kinds of

game from the elephant and the tiger to snipe and woodcock”.265

Indeed he was so well connected in his sporting activities that it was

almost inevitable he was chosen by the big-game hunter, Major

Percy Marlborough Stewart, to illustrate his memoirs Round the

World with Rod and Rifle. He was clearly an indomitable game

hunter himself, as the account given by Arthur Warren of his near

260 Mackenzie, 1996: 301; see Green and Seddon, 2000: 6-16. 261 Stearn, 1986: 147; Woodville’s father was also named Richard Caton Woodville. 262 Woodville, 1914: 239, 251; Warren, 1906: 295-96. Volunteering had itself become “the spectator sport in mid-Victorian Britain”, Summers, 1976: 107. 263 Warren, 1906: 296. 264 Stearn, 2004: 229; Warren, 1906: 295. 265 Warren, 1906: 295.

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death exploits in the bush with a large boar testifies.266 Although

described on his death as “the English Meissonier”, Caton Woodville

is little known today. 267 He was, however, much praised in his

lifetime, not least by the monarchy, from whom he received several

commissions, and by John Everett Millais (1829-96), whose son

quotes his father as saying “[d]euced clever fellow that Woodville.

He’d be an R.A. if I had a voice in the matter”.268

In spite of the popularity of his artwork at the end of the nineteenth

century, however, there is a marked lack of information on

Woodville’s life or work. What little there is, consists of his 1914

autobiography, Random Recollections, (itself a racy account),

contemporary reviews in the press, half a dozen magazine articles,

one limited to his sporting illustrations, entries in the Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography and on Wikipedia, as well as scant

mention in books or chapters on nineteenth-century military art

generally.269 Hichberger, for example, comments that he was

“regarded as highly skilled at making ‘artist’s impressions’ of events

he had not witnessed” and whose chief artistic quality was his strong

moral conviction in the “righteousness of the imperial cause”, while

Roger Stearn refers to him as probably the artist who is most likely

to have “shaped the British public’s image of war, especially

imperial war” before 1914.270 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith refer to

Woodville as one of those artists who exploited the market for

British battle paintings established by Butler, and whose

266 Warren, 1906: 298. 267 Woodville’s last major painting, Hallowe’en 1914: Stand of the London Scottish on Messines Ridge, 31st Oct-1st Nov 1914 (1927) was, like the Roll Call, taken by royal command to Buckingham Palace, Stearn, 2004:230; It has been suggested that Woodville was subjected to “some degree of prejudice” for specialising in contemporary rather than historical battle pieces, Hichberger, 1988: 95; Stearn, 2004: 230 citing the obituary in the Times 22 August 1927. 268 Millais, 1899: 233, whose son commented that Woodville’s drawings in the Illustrated London News “were an especial joy to him”; it was Millais who also proposed Butler for associate membership of the Royal Academy. 269 These articles are listed in the bibliography under Compton, R, Mayhew, A. and Warren, A.; Stearn refers to Woodville’s own account as “considered unreliable”, Stearn, 2004: 229. 270 Hichberger, 1988: 95. Stearn, 2004: 230. .

88

“imaginative dramatisations of glorious victories or noble, hard-

fought defeats, all treated in a realistic graphic style, catered

perfectly for the jingoist appetite of the period”.271 Kestner follows

Lalumia in his critique of Woodville’s emphasis on the magnificent,

defiant heroism of the soldier, even in the face of defeat or blunder,

while Harrington is content to itemise Woodville’s work, with

extracts from the occasional contemporary review.272 Work on his

sporting illustrations for Major Stewart (fig.35) can be viewed in the

archives of Beverley Treasure House under the title Artists and

Adventurers.273 His prints and illustrations can be seen reproduced in

the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century press, in

particular, the Illustrated London News and the Graphic, as well as

in other contemporaneous publications, such as H.W. Wilson’s With

the Flag to Pretoria and Louis Creswicke’s South Africa and the

Transvaal War and on postcards and magic lantern slides. His

paintings are now in the collections of the National Army Museum,

in various regimental museums scattered widely throughout Great

Britain, or are in private collections. There are four of his works in

Tate Britain, none of which is currently on display.274

Between 1876 and 1877, Woodville, like his fellow war artist, Crofts,

and the Swiss painter, Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), trained in

Düsseldorf, before being sent out by the Illustrated London News at

the age of twenty to accompany the Turks towards the end of the

Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.275 From this experience he

developed a long association with the press, sometimes working

abroad, but mostly, especially latterly, from his studio in London.

His friendships included many of the “Specials”, as well as the

French artist, de Neuville (1835-85) for whom, whilst in Egypt, he

“made many sketches and had many photographs taken of the 271 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 167, 172. 272 Kestner, 1995: 200; Lalumia, 1984: 147; Harrington, 1993: 176-308. 273 BTHAG: DDX 1414, 1414/1, 1414/8. 274 Until 2015, images of only three of the four were available. 275 Pott was also said to show a clear influence of the school of Düsseldorf. Art Journal, 1873, vol. XXXV: 198.

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trenches”.276 Once free of the studio and able to witness a theatre of

war for himself, he soon developed an interest in battle painting,

moving away from his early training in religious art to a subject

taken from Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great for his first

Royal Academy submission in 1879, Before Leuthen, December 3rd,

1757 (private collection). This met with general approval, the

Athenaeum referring to “a large sense of breadth in effect, energy in

the design of individual figures, and that quality which is precious in

such works-a universal movement of the figures”.277

Although Woodville did indeed follow in the wake of Butler’s

meteoric impact in the mid-1870s, both his style and approach were

markedly different, as is demonstrated in his 1902 painting, All That

Was Left of Them (fig.33).278 First appearing in the Illustrated

London News under the title Death or Glory, this is a vibrant

narrative of soldiers who are far from subdued by their experience of

war, unlike Butler’s sorry-looking Dr Bryden, allegedly the sole

survivor from Kabul, in The Remnants of an Army, Jellalabad,

January 13th1842 (fig.34).279 Here we have men of a very different

metal, men who are defiant to the end, heroic men who are fulfilling

their moral obligation to the rest of humanity and to the British

Empire in particular, and who are evidently proud to do so.280 They

epitomise the view expressed by Duffield Osborne that “[w]hen we

come to die, we shall die leaving men behind us” (my italics).281

They are the very antithesis of Butler’s sympathetic representation of

defeat in Afghanistan, which John Mackenzie has described as

“clearly designed as a warning against the sacrifices of heroic

276 Woodville, 1914: 61. 277 The Athenaeum, 17 May 1879: 67. 278 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 167. 279 Woodville painted two pictures with this title. The 1902 painting refers to the stand of the 17th Lancers at Modderfontein; Death or Glory: C Squadron of the 17 Lancers at Modderfontein, 17 September 1901 appeared in the paper on 2 November 1901. 280 Robinson, Gallagher and Denny, 1961: 2. 281 Hatt, 1993: 60.

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endeavours”.282 This was no longer a warning that the turn-of-the-

century public wanted to hear, with British troops fighting for their

lives, and certainly Woodville, unlike Butler, had no aversion to

portraying the heat of battle. As late as 1964, when All That Was left

of Them was presented to the Queen’s Own Lancers Museum, it was

said to be “[b]y far the most valuable presentation to be made”, and

was ceremoniously handed over with a quotation from the original

text accompanying the painting: “[s]uch deeds may not win battles,

but such courage makes our nation”.283

All That Was Left of Them shows a central block of men facing

outwards, most standing but others sheltering behind rocks for cover,

as they hold off the enemy troops advancing in greater numbers from

the rear. There is little expression on the men’s faces as they await

their destiny, with all the outward appearance of conquering heroes,

presenting a very manly, phlegmatic, stance to the outside world.

These are not men who have been beaten down by their experiences

in war. Rather they are offered as role models for youth, the

inspirational stuff of legends, such as can be read about in tales of the

wild west, of G A Henty or the adventure stories in Boys Own Paper

and similar juvenile literature, the latter, indeed, reproducing many

of Woodville’s popular images in turn.284 His “Gentleman in Khaki”

(fig.36), for example, with bandaged head, legs akimbo, rifle at the

ready and steely look, designed to accompany Kipling’s The Absent-

Minded Beggar, was especially popular and could be seen

everywhere in Britain, its likeness reproduced as statues, medals and

prints.285 It was on this fertile, artistic and literary foundation that

Robert Baden-Powell’s 1908 Scouting for Boys was able to build in

282 Mackenzie, 1996: 300. 283 White Star and Vedette, November, 1964: 164-65. 284 Paris, 2000: 74; Henty had been a war correspondent in the Crimea and is said to have imported his journalistic style into his novels, Springhall, 1968: 1105. It is almost certain that such literature was read by the soldiers, reinforcing their mission to fight for the empire, James, 1973: 97. 285 Wilkinson-Latham, 1979: 261. This co-operation between Kipling and Woodville highlights their shared focus on the individual and, frequently, the underdog.

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such a phenomenal manner, and in a mutual reinforcement of art and

contemporary cultural expectations.

Set against a grey sky, slightly streaky, but lightening in the dawn,

Woodville’s men, clad in khaki, are silhouetted monumentally,

heroically, their sculptural composition prefiguring their own

celebratory memorial on death, captured in the very moment that

death becomes inevitable. Light streaks across the face of the central

figure, drawing attention to the chiselled cheeks of the soldier to his

left and the seated soldier at his feet, in an almost photographic

staging which highlights the men who pose bravely as they would

wish to be remembered. These men are models for their own epitaph.

The peculiar combination of the light and the upward angle from

which the picture is painted, lend themselves to a three dimensional

representation in either relief or in the round, aided by the stolid,

earthbound stance of the soldiers, strongly anticipating the

monumentality of the commandos commemorated in the Second

World War Memorial at Spean Bridge. The viewer’s eye is drawn to

this central figure standing defiantly, bareheaded, legs akimbo,

facing the front of the canvas, his right arm flung backwards and his

left hand grasping a pistol pointing to the ground. Like Gentleman in

Khaki, he epitomises the view of Canon J.H.Skrine, writing in

Religious Thought and National Service in 1911 that “[w]ar is not

murder, as some fancy; war is sacrifice [. . .] which is the soul of

Christianity”.286 Courageous in his virtue, he is effectively disarmed,

presenting himself for the ultimate, Christian, surrender. These

soldiers have been transformed into intrepid, Protestant, martyrs,

offering up their lives for the greater good of their fellow citizens just

as they reference earlier, eighteenth-century, heroic paintings,

including West’s The Death of General Wolfe, replete with Christian

286 Summers, 1976:120; just such a view of religious martyrdom was echoed by the Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang in 1917 in his address to the boys of Pocklington School, when he referred to “the sublime self-sacrifice of a death in a noble cause”. The Pocklingtonian, 1917.

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iconography. Unlike Butler’s Dr Bryden and her Crimean heroes,

however, they glory, rather than suffer, in their defiance.

To the left of centre, Woodville places a second soldier standing at

right angles, firing his rifle outwards, leaning forwards in single-

minded concentration as he aims. His action is mirrored by a third

soldier standing pugnaciously and aiming in the same direction. In

the shadow of the second soldier, a fourth has just been shot and is

falling backwards, his gun blasted out of his left hand, which is

curved as if the weapon were still there. His right elbow is bent up

across his chest as he disappears backwards behind the main figure,

where his face is hidden, his bent legs, astride those of a fallen

comrade, on the point of giving way beneath him. Squatting before

the central figure a soldier, already wounded, is firing straight out of

the canvas, challenging the viewer to feel what it must be like under

fire, in the recognition that there is no other employment where it is a

requirement to face death. It is both exciting and unnerving as the

drama and horror of war collide. To the right of the central figure,

another soldier, his features partly obscured by a hat, is holding his

hands over his eyes in pain as he leans forward, still clutching his

rifle, while by his side his comrade is firing towards the right of the

painting. Although the men are bunched together in extremis, the

overall impression is not of a static painting. Instead the aim of

Woodville’s composition is to present a cohesive unit working

together to achieve a shared, patriotic, outcome in the face of

adversity and, as such, it acquires a curiously mobile quality. The

message here would be clear to its first audience; these men are

heroes to be emulated, for when death comes, it will be glorious, pro

Patria mori.287

Not only is their masculinity emphasised by their defiant stance; it is

replicated in their pointed, virile, weaponry, firing off in all

287 A sentiment satirised by T H Crosland (1865-1924) in his contemporary poem, Slain.

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directions, in what Bill Nasson has described as the “stridently

masculinist iconography” fitting for traditional history paintings.288

Woodville, who had a great admiration for the army and all things

military, trusted in the nobility of war which he strove to represent in

his art, echoing Henty in his mantra that “it is our pluck and fighting

powers that have made us their masters”.289 Working assiduously to

rebut his own belief that, notwithstanding the then popularity of his

work, neither the British public, nor even the army cared much for

military pictures, I suggest that Woodville made every effort to

emphasise the more sensational aspects of his work, regretting that

“after a war such as ours in South Africa, if it had been fought by the

French or the Germans, one would have seen miles of canvas

covered with the brave deeds of the soldiers”.290

To compensate for early military disappointment, and, perhaps,

because of it, British soldiers took on the role of modern day knights,

of adventurers, of frontiersmen, of sportsmen, displaying their

superior moral qualities as they fought against vastly unequal

odds.291 Literary scholars have investigated how this disjuncture was

reflected in contemporary literature, Steve Attridge commenting on

writers’ attempts to “bridge the gap” “between expectation and

fulfillment” [sic] and “with rhetorical flourish”.292 Poets such as

Kipling and W.E.Henley (1849-1903) had already perpetuated the

“healthy belligerence” of the imperial adventure story, Kipling with

his music hall inspired Barrack Room Ballads, published in 1892,

and Henley in his 1890, Song of the Sword.293 Henley’s poetry and

essays are peppered with imagery of virility, heroism and the

military, while the Tommy Atkins of the Barrack Room Ballads was

everywhere, simultaneously denounced as a vulgar hooligan and

288 Nasson, 2002: 827. 289 Cited in Paris, 2000: 7. 290 Woodville, 1914: 79. 291 In fact the number of British troops eventually needed to gain victory was vastly in excess of the numbers of their Boer opponents. 292 Attridge, 2003: 46; see also Van Wyk Smith’s book, Drummer Hodge. 293 Attridge, 2003: 118; Henley’s poem was dedicated to his mentor, Kipling.

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praised for being the gritty workhorse of the imperial forces, the

rough diamond with a capacity for heroism.294 When news of a series

of defeats reached Britain, Henley reacted with incomprehension,

and his poem, Remonstrance, which refers initially to “[h]itch”

“blunder” “new disaster”, works itself round to a paean of praise for

the troops who will soon “strike, home!”295 As the war progressed,

with it came the dawning reality of Britain’s dwindling superiority,

that “final break between the ‘sporting’ self-confident attitude of the

early imperial era and the growing sense of grim struggle” into the

twentieth century.296

Although his was a very different style from that of Butler, I argue,

as partial evidence of her artistic legacy, that Woodville’s All That

Was Left of Them bore the influence of her 1875 academy entry,

Quatre Bras (fig.37), representing an infantry square stolidly

confronting a cavalry charge the day before the Battle of Waterloo.

Here too, soldiers form a cohesive, close-knit and defensive unit,

facing bravely out in each direction, ready to meet a larger, more

powerful, force; Britain, the sturdy island nation, is confronting the

world with grit and independence. True to Butler’s principles, the

enemy in Quatre Bras is not shown, and like Woodville’s force, this

regiment, too, was eventually defeated, but in a worthy manner.

Moreover, Woodville has subverted military facts by portraying the

British as the underdogs, whereas in reality their troops far exceeded

those of their Boer opponents, much as he had done in his 1898

painting The Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman (fig.9), in a

partisan effort to elicit sympathy for the British.297 This is at a time

when there had been growing disquiet over British army tactics as

evidenced by a remark published in the Pall Mall Gazette in

December 1900 that

294 See Buchanan, 1899: 774-89; Henley, 1900: 27-39. 295 Nutt, 1908: 136-37. 296 Hichberger, 1988: 114. 297 It is, however, the case that the initial forces despatched to South Africa were woefully inadequate as Butler’s husband, General Butler, had predicted.

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it must always be remembered that the entire Boer army is mounted and that the bulk of the British army goes on foot. It seems absurd to mention such a fact; yet it is extremely dubious if the War Office has even yet quite realized it.298

Butler’s was not the only possible model for defiant resistance.

Woodville would already have been aware of several military stories

of “heroic” deaths, such as Custer’s last stand at Little Bighorn in

1876, widely reported and illustrated, likened to the death of General

Gordon and said to be “as traumatic as the massacre by Zulus of an

entire British column at Isandlwana” [sic].299 He would also have

known the pictorial representation of that disaster in The Last Stand

of the 24th Regiment at Isandhlwana (1885) (National Army

Museum) painted by a fellow newspaper illustrator, Charles Edwin

Fripp, (1854-1906) in 1879.300 At the same time, “the incomparable

Frederic Remington” (1861-1909), whom Woodville had met during

the Sioux uprising in 1891, was producing sketches of the struggles

between the American Indians and the American cavalry for

Harper’s Weekly, including scenes of ambush and The Last Stand.301

Even Crimean Simpson, Woodville’s colleague at the Illustrated

London News, was delegated to cover the Modoc Indian wars in

1873, and sent home several images including one of a small number

of Indians holding a large troop of soldiers at bay.302 By choosing to

use this model, employed effectively by Edwin Landseer (1802-73)

in his 1846 painting, Stag at Bay, (Royal Collection) Woodville was

working with tried, tested and well-known material onto which he

was able to graft his own particular heroic interpretation.

298 Pall Mall Gazette, 22 December 1900. 299 Johnson, 1978: 46-47. 300 See also the 1880 painting The Last Gallant Stand of the 66th Regiment at Maiwand (Royal Berkshire Regimental Museum, Salisbury) by Harry Payne (1858-1927). 301 Johnson, 1978: 56-61. 302 Johnson, 1978: 54.

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Based on a real, and tragic, incident, All That Was Left of Them was

calculated to show the British soldier at his finest; bloody but

unbowed, and carrying on the best chivalric and Christian traditions

of the army just as it fed the appetite of a domestic audience in

Britain for this kind of imagery. As a counterweight, numerous press

reports carried accounts of the devious behaviour of the Boers who

had worn misappropriated British army uniforms in order to entrap

their opponents. Whereas the “British officer should be a gentleman

first and an officer second” and Tommy Atkins, his private, was “a

bit of ‘all right’”, the “flower” of the trenches according to the

Illustrated London News, the Boers were said to have “shifty” eyes

and were not to be trusted; they were well known for not washing,

for low cunning and for advertising the “usual fiction” of low

casualty numbers.303 When they were not being despised for their

ungentlemanly conduct, Boers were regarded as “shambling oafs

who grinned vacuously and fell over their rifles”.304

Woodville was keen to differentiate between the qualities of the

British and the Boer, and, although he never visited South Africa and

worked entirely from his London studio during this period, to bring

so-called Boer habits and atrocities to the attention of the British

public. When the Boer Commandant-General, Piet Cronje was

captured at Paardeberg, Woodville used a sketch from one of the

“Specials”, Frederic Villiers, (1851-1922), to produce a drawing of

the scene entitled The Surrender of Cronje, February 27 1900

(fig.38).305 In this, isolated from his compatriots, Cronje presents as a

large shambling figure as he faces Lord Roberts, his heavy hide

whip, or sjambok, hanging at his side. Apart from his great size, the 303 Bond, 1972: 17, who cites the Duke of Cambridge; see also Lynch, 1903: 48 and Wilson, 1901: 430, 399 on the alleged characteristics of the Boers. In fact the Boer figures were almost certainly accurate; see also L.P.Austin in ILN, 10 November 1900. 304 Wilkinson-Latham, 1970:137; see also the article by George Lacy, Some Boer Characteristics (1900) referring to the dishonesty and dirty life-style of the Boers. The troops were lectured on these traits on board ship en route for the Cape, Nasson, 2000: 124. 305 Reproduced in Wilson, 1901: 431 from a drawing first published in ILN, 31 March 1900.

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most noticeable feature is his full, black, shaggy beard which

dominates his face, with random tufts of hair visible from behind his

right ear, stretching down to the collar. His eyes, focussed on

Roberts, are deep-set beneath bushy black eyebrows, so it is difficult

to gauge their precise expression, but it is certainly not friendly. His

clothes hang on him awkwardly as he stands with his weight slightly

on his right foot so that his shoulders are not square and he appears

to almost crumple from the waist. Over a jacket, buttoned only once

near the top and otherwise left to hang open, he wears a creased

knee-length coat in a lighter shade flapping open by his sides. His

trousers, a similar shade to the jacket, are baggy, their bottoms

casually rolled up to reveal scuffed walking boots. “Was this the

terrible Cronje?” this “great heavy bundle of a man”, asks one eye-

witness incredulously. “Was it possible that this was the man who

had held back the British army at Magersfontein?”306

And what of Lord Roberts, his adversary, known to have been neat and

small in stature? Although he is only shown in semi-profile, it is clear

that his dress is immaculate and he holds his “trim figure” very straight,

with shoulders back and head held high.307 He wears a moustache rather

than a beard, and his uniform comprises well-fitting jacket with

epaulettes, breeches, knee length, very highly polished boots with spurs,

and a neat forage cap. His sword, with ceremonial jewelled hilt, is slung

in a sheath to hang straight down by his left leg.308 He takes centre stage,

watched by the British troops, mostly in kilts with pristine knife-edge

pleats and pith helmets, standing to attention with bayonets raised.

Behind them can be seen the head of a second Boer soldier cautiously

observing, his face almost a replica of Cronje’s, but more watchful. To

the right of the drawing, foregrounding the camp, are two officers,

dressed in similar style to Roberts. Cronje is situated in enemy territory.

306 Wilson, 1901: 430, quoting a Mr Hands. 307 Wilson, 1901: 430. 308 Beards were not worn in the British army save by the King (and, later, Augustus John, 1878-1961).

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One officer is taking notes, while the second looks on, adopting an

uncharacteristically casual pose, as, arms crossed, he studies Cronje as

if he were a curiosity.

In this drawing there is no movement; the situation is calm and

measured, with Roberts in charge. Everyone is perfectly still,

surrounding the two protagonists as if they were in a theatre, waiting

for the plot to unfold. The long shadows indicate strong light,

possibly early morning, with thick dark lines on those parts in

shadow, and highlighting every wrinkle in the sun. As the line of

soldiers recedes off to the far right of the column, faces disappear

and we are left with scant impression of the men, though even those

more closely delineated are impassive, with the regulation

moustache.309 I suggest that the Boer habit of wearing a beard was

something of a gift to Woodville as not only did it mask expression

but it served to highlight the alleged lack of discipline and

cleanliness within their troops, especially given the British army’s

then prohibition of beards on grounds of hygiene. This drawing is

making a statement about British superiority, domestically and on the

field of war, where Woodville’s concern is not for vibrant action but

for patriotic topicality; a need to show the British public that here, at

last, is a victory to celebrate, a victory for British civilisation. Cronje

has surrendered.

Warren writes that most of Woodville’s black-and-white drawings

were done at night, while in the obituary in the Connoisseur he is

“said to have been somewhat too apt to leave the execution of

commissions until the last possible moment”.310 Both critics agree

that he was a rapid worker and I suggest that his heavy shading and

reliance on type are evidence here of hasty execution. Although

referring to his paintings, rather than illustrations, Spielmann

deplored “the blackness of his colour”, an attribute which may well

309 Shaving facial hair above the lip was prohibited in the British army until 1916. 310 Warren, 1906: 299; the Connoisseur, vol.79, 1927: 127.

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derive from his original sketches.311 According to Warren, Woodville

had the capacity to become completely absorbed in his work,

painting intensely, and both Warren and the Connoisseur refer to the

absence of live models.312 Instead, when working on his larger

paintings he would make detailed studies of each figure before

assembling them on the canvas. Although the use of such sketches

would suggest a more measured approach in his paintings, I argue

that in his drawings he used types as a kind of artistic shorthand for

the message he wished to convey. In this drawing, he presents the

viewer with three separate types, respectively representing the Boer

soldier, the British officer and the British private, all without any

individuality, with the possible exception of the “observer” soldier to

the right, and readily recognisable from his other works. For a

contemporary audience this dependence on type was to be applauded

as confirmed by A.C.Carter who praised Woodville for conveying

“all that stolidity, eagerness, coolness and self-sacrifice incarnated in

Tommy Atkins” in his work, as this “face of a British hero [. . .]

happily for us as a nation [. . .] can be recognised at home in the face

of the man in the street”.313 As Pamela Fletcher has observed, type is

only the starting point from which to develop character which in turn

is dependent on the exploration of emotion.314 In Woodville’s work,

this second phase is frequently missing and signs of emotion are

virtually non-existent as the players on this stage take their parts, the

British with their “stiff upper lip” and smart uniforms, and the

unkempt, bearded Boer, hinting at his darker, more devious, nature.

As Harrington observes, Woodville was constantly employed by

both Henry Graves and Co. and the Illustrated London News,

producing popular images of the war.315 A second drawing soon

followed, but this time drawn completely from Woodville’s

311 Spielmann, 1901: 423. 312 Warren, 1906: 299; the Connoisseur, vol.79, 1927: 127. 313 Carter, 1900: 24. 314 Fletcher, 2013: 22. 315 Harrington, 1993: 295.

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imagination. Ordeal by Fire (fig.39), tells a different story, and one

praised by Carter for its “astonishing display of industry and gifted

facility”.316 This is a dramatic depiction of British troops under

attack, the flames throwing the “doomed Guards in their khaki into

high relief”, and in many ways this representation foreshadows the

monumentality of All That Was Left of Them. The caption reads [a]t the battle of Biddulphberg, near Senekal on May 28, the Grenadiers, under General Rundle, were holding a position on the Berg, when, possibly by the carelessness of some of the men, the dry grass was set alight, and several of the wounded were badly injured by fire before they could be removed.317

Woodville’s central figure, like his commander-in-chief, Roberts, is

dressed immaculately in his uniform, standing defiantly, as he cocks

his rifle in the direction of the attack. True to type, he is erect,

heroically impassive, with no apparent sign of fear, ignoring the

billowing smoke and flames threatening to engulf his troops. At his

feet lies an injured soldier, stretched out as he fell and hoisting

himself up on his elbow. He is attended by a young grenadier, gazing

up admiringly at the central inspirational figure. Immediately behind

him, is another wounded soldier who, unusually, has no moustache

so that his youthful face is able to reveal at least a semblance of pity

as he looks down at his injured companion.318 To his left a third

soldier, closely resembling Woodville’s earlier Gentleman in Khaki,

his head wrapped in a bloody bandage is carrying yet another

casualty off to safety, past a dying soldier supported by his friend.

White spots in the sky signify return fire and explosions. Whereas

the earlier drawing bore the drama of anticipation, this shows the

chaos of battle as it happens. The overall effect is one of urgency, the

front figures silhouetted against the hazy, impressionistic background

of flames, smoke and sky. Again, there is evidence of heavy shading

and reliance on type in the central figure and the stoical attitude of

316 This drawing appeared in ILN, 28 July 1900; Carter, 1900: 20. 317 Wilson, 1900: 677; Carter, 1900: 20. 318 This detail indicates his youth and an inability to grow facial hair.

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the injured, though, unusually, there does seem to be an element of

tender emotion, in the two young soldiers, the one without facial hair

and the other caring for the wounded.

A third drawing, The Night Charge of the 19th Hussars near

Lydenberg on November 7th, 1900 (fig.40) shows Woodville in his

most imaginative mode.319 This is a work full of drama and

movement. As the name indicates, there is no sun, and such light as

there is, comes from the explosive gunfire illuminating the sky.

Mounted British troops are shown storming across the canvas

through a Boer encampment, with swords raised and pistols firing.

At the extreme left of the drawing, a hussar is seen twisting in his

saddle as he controls his rearing horse, while at the same time

shooting steadily at a mounted Boer, riding alongside. It is clear from

the way his opponent’s head is flung back, that he has hit his mark.

The centre of the drawing is taken up with a life and death chase

between a British soldier, sword raised behind his shoulder in a

manner to match Woodville’s 1897 painting The Relief of the Light

Brigade, 25 October, 1854 (fig.41), and his Boer counterpart,

furiously urging on his grey mount, arm raised to protect himself

from the onslaught. Both horses are at full stretch and in danger of

trampling over the falling body of a second Boer immediately in

front, as he tumbles from his horse. Although Spielmann, in his

article on Crofts, bemoans the “comparatively rare presence of “go”

and abandon” in British military art, this is a scene “full of spirit, go

and fire”, which he concedes is Woodville’s hallmark.320 It is without

doubt, a scene of confusion as the two forces clash, and there is little

attempt at – or indeed space for – characterisation of the men. The

priority here is the drama, not the execution. As in other Woodville

representations, it is in the horses that expressions of fear and

adrenalin can be seen, as they rear up, swerve or are pursued against

a black sky.

319 ILN, 15 December 1900, reproduced in Creswicke, vol. vi, 1901: 104. 320 Spielmann, 1901: 421, 423.

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“Patriotic in nature and prolific in output,” Woodville rarely, if ever,

missed an opportunity to point out alleged bad behaviour by the

enemy.321 Such images were eagerly anticipated, especially at the

outset of the war, with the various constituents of the public, the War

Office and newspaper proprietors. Entrapment, as for example the

abuse of a white flag to lure the unsuspecting British out into the

open and into an ambush, was especially popular and was used to

reinforce the moral inferiority of the Boers. It was simply not cricket

to wear British uniforms, or to lie in wait as, for example, at the

Battle of the Modder River, rather than facing up to the British in

open combat, for it was widely accepted that “[g]iven a fair field,

man to man, Tommy is more than a match for the Boer”.322 Thus a

straightforward drawing by Melton Prior (1845-1910) of a convoy

during the Battle of Lombard’s Cop, in which an incidental shell hit

a British ambulance wagon, was exaggerated by Frank Patterson

(1871-1952) in the Illustrated London News to imply a deliberate

direct hit on the injured.323 In similar vein, Woodville produced a so-

called “juicy” Boer atrocity for the press under the title, The Dangers

of Mercy: Indian Ambulance-Bearers under Fire (fig.42).324

Recruited by General Buller, there were approximately two thousand

stretcher bearers, known as “the body-snatchers”, including eight

hundred members of Natal’s Indian community who had wished to

demonstrate their loyalty to the British Empire.325 Unable to fight,

they were yet in the forefront of the action, and the alleged Boer

“atrocity” against these men was not only an assault on humanitarian

relief, but held a more sinister message, underlining the Boer

321 ILN, 9, December 1899, under the title Boer Tactics, quoted in Johnson, 1978: 147. 322 Burleigh, 1900: 44. 323 The original drawing was reproduced in the ILN on 2 December 1899, with Patterson’s version appearing a week later on 8 December 1899, Johnson, 1978: 148-49. 324 Wilson, 1901: 275. 325 Pakenham, 1992: 224-25. These ambulance-bearers were led by Mohandas Ghandi.

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treatment of non-whites generally and the British government’s

stated concern for the political rights of the black population.326

With action pictures remaining a challenge in this conflict, artists

sought hard for subjects with a lively representation. One

contemporary account in sporting terms by Wilson in With the Flag

to Pretoria has the Boers running a “neck and neck race with the

Colonial troopers for the summit, but the Colonials won”.327 Given

that there was so little to see on the Veldt, just such a race provided

much needed dramatic material for artistic representation by Godfrey

Douglas Giles in his 1902 painting, The Race for the Kopje (fig.43).

Giles had the distinct advantage of having served as an officer during

previous campaigns and of working as a war illustrator in South

Africa for the Graphic, which accorded him first-hand knowledge of

the topography and conditions, but perhaps more importantly, credit

for truthful representation.328 Imperial troops are clustered to the

bottom centre right of the painting as they catch sight of a group of

Boer riders galloping in from the distant left, making for the kopje,

or small hill, in between. They look as if they have just noticed the

Boers and are jumping into their saddles, straining for the advantage

of the look-out position on top of the hill. A horse stands waiting,

while his rider is crawling up the side of the hill on all fours, rifle in

hand. The race is on. Curiously Giles has introduced a startled,

khaki-coloured hare running across the front of the canvas, possibly

to denote alarm, possibly referencing a sporting analogy. The

execution of this painting, too, appears rushed with loose brushwork

and little attempt at a subtle delineation of colour between the

background of the Veldt, the animals and the men, and is very

similar in style to rapidly executed press illustrations. Once again,

none of the men’s faces can be seen, the nearer, and anonymous, 326 ILN, 9 June 1900. A decision had been taken to exclude Indian forces and maintain this as a white man’s war, Thompson, 2002: 13. 327 Wilson, 1901: 446. 328 Giles, like Sargent had been trained under Carolus-Duran (1837-1917), of whom Butler wrote in her autobiography “[h]e illustrates a very disagreeable present phase of French art” though with no further explanation. Butler, 1993: 102.

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imperial troops facing away and the Boers too far distant for

individualisation just as in much of Woodville’s work. This is in

stark contrast to Giles’ earlier 1884 painting, Charge at El Teb,

Sudan (Museum of the Kings Royal Hussars, Winchester), a charge

at which Giles himself was present, a very busy and smoke-filled

canvas where the officers are all easily identified, as a kind of

“gallery of Victorian heroism” though, again, as in many of

Woodville’s representations, all are tight-lipped and with the most

limited of outward demeanour.329

Other subjects depicted during the war were sieges, and especially

their relief, illustrations of ambushes or other so-called un-

gentlemanly conduct by the Boers and examples of individual

heroism. Among the latter is Wollen’s 1901 painting, The Victoria

Cross (Durban Art Gallery, South Africa) showing one soldier

rescuing another by hoisting him onto his horse. This shows a

marked resemblance to Butler’s work, and in particular her early

picture, Missing. Both paintings represent the aftermath of a battle,

where the horse of one soldier is absent; both are set in a desolate

and deserted countryside, and although the wars were very different,

the tone is noticeably similar in its focus on the distress of the

individual in adversity.

In spite of an earlier generation’s presentation of the Siege of

Sebastopol in panoramic mode, by their very nature sieges did not

generally provide good material for action pictures, but once relieved

they took on the role of reassuring the public in Britain of a

satisfactory outcome after days of heightened anxiety followed in the

press. Accordingly, the painting by John Frederick Henry Bacon

(1868-1914) entitled The Relief of Ladysmith (1900) (fig.44) is very

different in character to the energy of Woodville’s representations,

concentrating instead on the delight of the besieged, both civilian and

military, and showcasing the restrained and gentlemanly handshake 329 Kestner, 1995: 195.

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between General White, the besieged, and Lord Dundonald, the

rescuer. This was clearly an extremely popular image of British

endurance and good behaviour and a photogravure was offered

“[f]ree to purchasers of Bovril in bottles” through the agency of the

Illustrated London News.330

During the First World War, art critic P.G.Konody was to remark It is not without significance that in the majority of the Boer War pictures - that is to say those that were painted by eye-witnesses, and not made up from descriptive material-the artist has confined himself to depicting the South African veldt, with, perhaps, in the foreground some khaki-clad soldiers who at a distance are almost indistinguishable from the parched soil on which they tread; the actual fighting, the progress of the battle, is indicated by a few puffs of smoke over the horizon.331

Frustrated by the sameness of the landscape, the lack of colour in the

uniforms and the invisibility of the Boers, not to mention a string of

defeats, these artists (and not just Konody’s eye-witnesses)

frequently rejected truthful representations in favour of a more

palatable and romantic heroism, using their imagination to create an

image to which it was believed the public at home would relate. In an

interesting reflection on the new art of photography, his friend

Villiers described Woodville’s “wonderful rapidity” in transferring

his artistic conceptions “to the canvas as faithfully and directly as the

lens of the camera registers a subject”.332 Indeed, so convincing was

Woodville’s work that one Boer War veteran on seeing his 1901

painting My Brave Irish (Irish Rifles Regimental Museum) claimed

he was “able to recognise the very rocks; and there’s the wall behind

which I myself lay wounded. Painted from descriptions? Nonsense! I

know better than that. The artist must have been there.”333 I suggest

that this response was typical of a contemporary audience in Britain,

which had persuaded itself of the truthfulness of the artist’s

330 ILN, 23 February 1901. 331 Nevinson, 1917: 13. 332 Hichberger, 1988: 96. 333 Warren, 1906: 299, who refers to the painting as The Storming of Pieter’s Hill.

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representations, as the actual series of events in South Africa was just

too unpalatable and incredible to accept.

As Harrington argues, the inclusion of the Boers in paintings and

illustrations was almost obligatory in order to continue to stimulate

public interest.334 Military art might have become increasingly

popular in the late nineteenth century, but in their still ambivalent

attitude to the army, many late-Victorians wanted images which

allowed them to believe in Britain’s imperial destiny without the

concomitant evidence of the force, or the anguish required to achieve

it.335 Just as the Boer War was beginning to show up the fault-lines in

an unquestioning acceptance of imperialist supremacy, artists were

themselves fighting a rear-guard action, seeking to provide

reassurance that all was well at the expense of a more realistic and

sympathetic representation of war.336 Those who had previously

cried before Butler’s Balaclava were now proud of their soldiers’

defiant heroism in the field. Although military artists continued to

focus largely on the ordinary soldier, this was not on the soldier as an

individual but the soldier as a type, an embodiment of those moral

and Christian virtues promoted at the turn of the century.

Muscular Christianity

Towards the end of the nineteenth century this widespread belief

throughout Britain in the righteousness of the imperial cause was

accompanied by an increasingly religious interpretation of war.

Whereas the Duke of Wellington had famously pronounced that “a

man who has nice notions about religion has no business to be a

soldier”, a new trend towards “muscular Christianity” was being

334 Harrington, 1993: 297. 335 Paris, 2000: 30. 336 For Kipling, however, the Boer War was a catalyst to his changing views on Empire; see Attridge, 2003: 89. An interesting comparison with the work of the Social Realists can be made in reflecting on the changes Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914) was obliged to make to his 1878 painting Eventide at Westminster in order to make it more socially acceptable.

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developed, linking war to mediaeval chivalry, and one where it was

believed that “he who fears God most, fears man least”.337 This was

not an entirely new idea, stemming as it did from the Shaftesbury

ideals of politeness, selflessness and moral duty, but here extended to

encompass military personnel, and given a religious endorsement.338

The earlier, eighteenth-century “politesse” was thought to

compromise the masculinity of the male population and this

movement was needed to reconcile military aggression with more

genteel notions of chivalry.339 Edward Penny (1714-91) had already

painted The Marquis of Granby Relieving a Sick Soldier in 1765

(fig.45), portraying him in his generosity as a man of great integrity

and humanity and these attributes had, during the course of the

nineteenth century, seeped into the social fabric. Soldiers were no

longer just heroes; they were Christian heroes, reinforcing the strong

element of duty to nation and empire promulgated by the schools and

youth clubs. War, and the performance of war, became central to the

experience of masculinity which had to be earned through action.340

Initially the preserve of the aristocracy, these ideas permeated firstly

the middle classes followed by working-class young men and boys,

where they became absorbed and re-codified as a kind of “invented

tradition”.341 Contemporary boys’ literature was “without exception

dedicated to the imperial idea”, overlaid with a gloss of missionary

zeal which drew on this Christian morality, for as Holger Hoock has

observed, there was a “significant overlap between Christian

theology and the notion of patriotic example”.342 Whereas before the

Crimean War, the official policy had been to keep military chaplains

to a minimum, now they were encouraged, and from 1860 had even

337 Anderson, 1971: 51, 52; Girouard, 1981: 142. 338 Klein, 1994: 53. 339 Hoock, 2010: 180. 340 McVeigh, 2013: u/p [5]. 341 Hobsbawn, 1983: 6-11. 342 Dunae, 1980: 106-108; Hoock, 2010: 174.

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started to wear military uniforms.343 War and religion had become

mutually reaffirming as God joined the British army.344

As Mark Girouard has shown, “images of chivalry were absorbed

into everyday life” and each young soldier became a modern day

crusader as he volunteered for military duty, in the belief that he

“[w]ho dies for England sleeps with God”.345 Their skills, nicely

honed within the public school system, were ready to be used for

“the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes

and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of

men”.346 Shored up by rousing Christian hymns, such as Onward

Christian Soldiers, such ideas rapidly caught hold.347 Increasingly,

representations of heroes, especially the dead, were couched in

chivalric terms with knights clad in armour replacing an eighteenth-

century penchant for classical figures.348 In the late-Victorian period

military heroes became a careful cultural construct, whose stature

was raised to near sainthood, following their deaths, such as Henry

Havelock in 1857 and General Gordon in 1885.349 Both these men,

killed in service, were ideal material for near idolatry, Havelock

raising the siege of Lucknow after the Indian Uprising, and Gordon,

resisting the Mahdi in Sudan. Had they lived, both men may well

have attracted the thanks of a grateful nation; in death they were

worshipped as Christian, and therefore patriotic, heroes. In his 1857

painting, The Relief of Lucknow (fig.46), Barker places Havelock just

off centre, surrounded by British and Indian onlookers, admiring or

subdued against a magnificent backdrop of Indian architecture. He is

seen shaking hands with his compatriots, all dressed soberly and

eschewing triumphalism, in a very restrained, urbane manner, much

343 Anderson, 1971: 62. 344 The Boers, too, believed they had God on their side. 345 Girouard, 1981: 146; Attridge, 2003: 110, citing Alfred Austin’s Spartan Mothers. 346 Girouard, 1981: 142. 347 Written in 1868 by Sabine Baring-Gould. 348 At Clifton College the Boer War memorial was of a soldier in armour with sword and shield, Girouard, 1981: 163. 349 Cubitt, 2007: 3.

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as Dundonald at Ladysmith. As Harrington reports, this painting was

immediately popular and much praised by the art press for its

truthfulness.350 Nearly fifty years later, General Gordon’s Last Stand

(1893) (fig.47) by George William Joy (1844-1925) went further in

promoting the theme of the Christian hero and martyr, imaginatively

placing Gordon, one-time maverick and thorn in the flesh of the

Gladstone government, at the top of the stairs, whilst the followers of

the Mahdi crouch subserviently in an unholy huddle at the bottom.

Joy’s painting shows the moment of hesitation before the first spear

is thrown, reflecting the awe inspired by Gordon’s calm self-

possession even at the point of certain death as he “display[ed] to the

end his moral superiority over his enemies”.351 In his dramatic

composition, Joy was able to exploit the exhibition of the male body

to reinforce contemporary aspirations of gentlemanly behaviour.352

Whatever their qualities in lifetime, in death both men were seen to

embody all the chivalric virtues of a modern “gentle” knight and, as

such, acted as role models for their successors.353

The Pleasure Culture of War354 Filled with confidence and excitement, as indeed going

to a fox-hunt, the British Army embarked for war.355 Whereas his eighteenth-century counterpart may well have chosen to

paint a hunting scene with stags as the quarry, Woodville used his

sporting background as inspiration for his scenes from military life.

As Stephen Deuchar has pointed out, mere “horse-painters” were at

the bottom of the artistic hierarchy in the eighteenth century, even

though royalty and the landed gentry continued to be portrayed

seated on their favourite mounts, and, in times of war, it was

350 Harrington, 1993: 171. 351 Peck, 1998: 178, citing F.R.Wingate. 352 See Ray, 2011: 24. 353 This has echoes of Chaucer’s characterisation in The Canterbury Tales affirming its long lineage. 354 Dawson, 1994: 4. 355 Woodham-Smith, 1953: 141.

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believed that sporting pursuits might be beneficial.356 Significantly

Butler was indignant, if not a little amused, at being likened to Rosa

Bonheur (1822-99), making it clear that she was no horse painter;

she painted history, a sentiment endorsed by the critic of Life, which

praised her focus on “the loftier subject of humanity”, for “[h]ers is

the artist’s love - not the sportsman’s - a very different matter”.357

Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century, both Francis Grant (1803-

78) and Landseer were professionally recognised and knighted for

their sporting and animal paintings, providing a natural pathway for

painters such as Woodville and Charlton, who aspired to a more

elevated artistic genre.

In the text to his 1882 painting, Saving the Guns at Maiwand (fig.8),

Woodville describes [a]n incident in the battle of the Maiwand, Afghanistan, October 1880 when the British met with a reverse at the hands of an overwhelming army. A contingent of the Royal Horse Artillery, some badly wounded, are shown in retreat, at the same time endeavouring to the (sic) save the guns, which they ultimately succeeded in doing.358

He may well have added that this representation, like his later

illustration of The Night Charge of the 19th Hussars near Lydenberg,

had all the hallmarks of the hunt. Woodville’s painting is large and

brimming with movement. The cavalry is pounding towards the left

of the canvas in full retreat whilst fighting off their pursuers

advancing from the extreme right. The central figure, mounted, is

straining to his left as he concentrates on steadying his chestnut

horse, the first in a linked convoy pulling the gun carriage to safety.

He is dressed in khaki with a khaki pith helmet, relieved only by a

white cross band stretching from the right shoulder of his jacket to

just above his waist on his left side. A mottled blue bandage is

wrapped round his left leg, showing stains as the blood seeps 356 Deuchar, 1988: 137, 166. 357 Letter from Butler to Alice Meynell, May 1868, HHG (uncatalogued); Life, 1 November 1879. 358 WAG: 152.

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through. The injury is ignored, however, as both horse and rider

drive frantically on, the horse, his forelock blowing in the wind is

galloping, head held high although his wide-eyed expression hints at

his fear, echoed in the adjacent riderless horse.

Behind this group, the only black mount faces the front of the canvas

head on and at first sight seems to be coming straight at the viewer,

such is the force of Woodville’s representation, strikingly

reminiscent of Butler’s “greys” in her 1881 painting Scotland

Forever! (fig.48).359 It is, in fact, travelling alongside, head swerving

round as the rider jerks the reins high in his left hand and twists in

the saddle to point the way dramatically with his sword. This soldier

is wearing the uniform of an officer, again khaki, but with a broad

gold band across his chest elaborately secured, a white pith helmet

and immaculate white gloves. His demeanour is one of stoical grim

determination as he gallantly encourages the survivors to follow him

to safety.

The interest in this painting comes from this pulsating, eventful,

representation, which conveys intense excitement. It exudes a vibrant

electricity which privileges disaster and which is enhanced by the

underlying frisson of the situation, a “dangerous enjoyment”, as

Patrick Hennessy writes of his own twenty-first century battle

experience in Iraq.360 These soldiers are shown as heroes, in their

attempt to rescue triumph, in the form of the guns, from the jaws of

defeat. They are team players racing for the advantage, upholding the

honour of their side at all costs, “salvaging the dominant fiction in

the wake of defeat”.361 As in his drawings, these men, unlike

Butler’s, have very few individualised features. Nearly all sport

359 Although this was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly at a time when Butler’s relationship with the Fine Art Society had broken down, it is highly likely that Woodville had seen it by the time he came to paint Saving the Guns at Maiwand the following year. 360 Hennessy, 2010: 215. 361 It was Raglan’s concern to preserve the guns which led to the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava; Kestner, 1995: 206.

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identical moustaches, and it is once again in the features of the

horses that Woodville indicates any characterisation, rather than

those of the men. Woodville, the sportsman, is not concerned with

the nuances of the men’s emotions; rather, each soldier represents

that type of hero who is grimly doing his patriotic duty for his

Queen, country, empire and regiment; nothing more and nothing

less.362

Nevertheless, the painting was praised by The Times for its

“ineffaceable stamp of reality”, its “magnificent pieces of

expression” and “the manner in which the clearest personality of

each actor in the scene exists in true relation to its main spirit”.363 A

more modern critic, considering the human costs of war, is less

fulsome in his remark that, notwithstanding a defeat, the painting

“still has the flamboyant militarism characteristic of colonial battle

scenes of the 1880s and 1890s-so different in mood from the sober

realism of most Crimean War battle painting earlier in the century”,

but such criticism overlooks the effect it would have had upon a

contemporary spectator, searching for evidence of the British

soldiers’ sangfroid in adversity.364

In terms of his style, Woodville himself writes about how he had

learned from experience, perhaps to avoid the accusation of a hasty

approach to his work, to use “fewer and larger figures, much broader

in the brushwork and in its execution so as not to hamper the

movement and to give an idea of the rush of men”.365 Certainly this

painting is dynamic and less crowded than his Crimean paintings,

where the focus was on the clash of the two armies as they met face

to face, but it was not until the war in South Africa, that he really put

this new technique into practice. There, in the desert with fewer 362 At the time, Woodville was himself suffering from a “smashed ankle” and was painting with his “body turned to the left in an excruciatingly tiring position.” Woodville, 1914: 83. 363 Morris, 1996: 516, citing The Times, 3 June 1882. 364 Morris, 1996: 516. 365 Woodville, 1914: 82-83.

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visible participants he avoids vast numbers of soldiers and shows

with greater clarity individual action, reflecting the differing nature

of the war, where large-scale set-piece battles were rarely possible.

The onward rush of his earlier paintings of the Crimea, Maiwand and

Omdurman are not replicated in his more monumental and static

Boer War representations, which allow for a closer view of the men

featured, their interaction and their striking, defiant, body

language.366

In his choice of subject Woodville was followed by, among others,

Stanley Berkeley (1855-1909), whose painting Saving the Guns at

Colenso (York Museums Trust) represents a similar incident, not

from the Anglo-Afghan War but from South Africa, and again

wresting some vestige of success out of disaster, but with rather less

verve.367 Charlton’s 1893 offering, Placing the Guns (Royal Army

Military College Sandhurst) depicting an incident from the Egyptian

campaign, is as dynamic as Woodville’s, though in this case the

movement comes from the steep terrain down which the men, horses

and guns struggle to negotiate a foothold. The overriding interest

here derives from the two central soldiers, straining with tight reins

to hold back four excited horses as, propelled by the weight of the

carriage, they pour down the rocky incline. No enemy is visible and

may well be some distance away, the subject matter affording

Charlton the opportunity of displaying his skill in painting horses,

rather than as any commentary on the war.

Woodville and his contemporaries were acutely aware that

“Britishness” was all about what Linda Colley has described, as

“public-schools, fox-hunting, a cult of military heroism and of a

particular brand of manliness”.368 They readily appreciated that

366 There are of course exceptions such as The Night Charge of the 19th Hussars. 367 This painting is undated, but was almost certainly painted in 1900 given that Carter refers to it as a “forceful piece of work and worthy of a place in these pages”, Carter, 1900: 18. 368 Colley, 1994: 193.

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going to war, John Bright’s “gigantic system of outdoor relief for the

aristocracy”, just like engaging in sport, could be fun.369 More than

that, they saw it as part of their function to perpetuate this view, for

as Kestner has observed, the “role of the male artist qua male” (my

italics) in this period was “fundamental to his contributing to the

construction of masculinity”.370 It had long been held in Britain that

benefits to the “national character” were derived from the

gentlemen’s practice of shunning the frivolous pursuits of the effeminate nobility of the continent, and following manly exercise in the fresh air [. . .] invigorating both their minds and their bodies, whilst their offspring, partaking these effects, grow up bold and vigorous, for the defence of their country, both by sea and land.371

“Manly exercise” in this context referred to sporting activity,

traditionally hunting and shooting, without which heroic, warlike

endeavour was believed to be impossible. For General Wolseley

“[t]he reputation of being a really good officer was then by common

assent accorded to the man who brought the “manly” all round

qualities of the English gentleman, of the English sportsman, to bear

upon a sound knowledge of drill and a quick aptitude for its practice

in the field”.372 Such were the attributes and aspirations nurtured in

the public school system, particularly in the nineteenth century where

headmasters, such as Edmund Warre at Eton, J.E.C.Welldon at

Harrow and Hely Hutchinson Almond at Loretto, urged upon their

pupils their duty of self-sacrifice and sense of moral superiority.373

By March 1880, Blackwoods Magazine had been reporting that the

troops were “making the echoes ring with just such shouts as the

369 Summers, 1976: 108; this is still true today as evidenced by Hennessy’s remark that war felt “natural” and “much fun”, as if “they had turned up to the Arena on a big fight night”, Hennessy, 2010: 179, 167. 370 Kestner, 1995: 39. 371 Deuchar, 1988: 57, citing James Whyte in History of the British Turf (1840). 372 Bond, 1972: 21. Wolseley was General Butler’s commanding officer. 373 See Mangan, 1986: 113-39; Edward Thring of Uppingham School promoted the view that “the whole efforts of a school ought to be directed to making boys manly earnest and true”, Newsome, 1961: 195.

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playing fields of Harrow and Loretto know so well”.374 War was

perceived as Homeric, sporting prowess the prerequisite and the

sports field the parade ground, for just as team games, in this era of

Social Darwinism with its alleged vindication of racial superiority,

required courage, energy, perseverance and adherence to the rules, so

indeed did combat in battle.375 Fox-hunting might be fun, but “man

shooting is the finest sport of all” wrote Wolseley to his aunt, “the

more you kill, the more you wish to kill”.376 “All other pleasures”, he

wrote, “pale before the intense, the maddening delight of leading

men into the midst of an enemy.”377 Baden-Powell, said to be a

regular pig-sticker, agreed, rating “man-hunting” above football or

indeed “any other game”.378 In April 1900, The Spear carried a vivid

illustration of a British attack on Boer troops under the caption “[…]

and the most excellent pig-sticking ensued for about ten minutes”,

while Charlton produced a drawing entitled O, Your Whelps Wanted

Blooding, translating his domestic hunting imagery into warlike

scenes.379 “The characteristic act of men at war”, after all, “is not

dying, it is killing” as Joanna Bourke reminds us.380 Learning to do

just that “was part and parcel of a good education”, the tenets of

which cascaded down through the classes to embrace and enhance

the popular imagination and psyche through illustrated magazines,

songs, literature, music halls and boys’ clubs.381 The adventure of

Britain’s “sporting wars” which could be played out like football

across the plains of Africa was compelling and was no longer

confined to the privileged.382 It was a culture which had become

embedded in the founding, growth and maintenance of the empire.383

374 Blackwells Magazine, March, 1880: 375-76. 375 Mangan, 1986: 120; Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859; see Mangan, 1986: 3. 376 Farwell, 1973: 76. 377 Langer, 1960: 89. 378 Attridge, 2003: 63. 379 Illustration by Ambrose Walton reproduced in Attridge, 2003: 105; Charlton’s drawing appears reproduced in Attridge, 2003: 126, fig.5:1. 380 Bourke, 1996: 1. 381 Paris, 2000: 77. 382 Langer, 1960: 82, quoting Bismarck. 383 Colley, 1994: 9.

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Regardless of the emphasis on sport in nineteenth-century public

schools, there remained a real fear that men were no longer

masculine; that their distance from physical work had rendered them

feeble and effeminate.384 Alarmingly, three out of every five recruits

at the start of the Boer War had to be rejected as unfit for military

service.385 Notwithstanding the move towards genteel masculinity

highlighted by Trumbull and Copley, there remained a sense that the

boundaries between male and female and heterosexual and

homosexual were increasingly porous.386 Military paintings had the

capacity to convey visually important cultural ideals surrounding the

male body, especially in times of war.387 Thus messages of virility,

honour, courage, fighting prowess and ability to bear pain

effortlessly could be read from the (painless) works of many Boer

War artists, and as with the popular literature and music of the time

stimulated suitably military responses from Britain’s youth.388

Professional soldiers may not have been deceived, as one Royal

Army Medical Corps officer said at Ladysmith “My God! What a

sight! I wish the politicians could see their handiwork”, but this

heartfelt reflection did not prevent young men from approaching war

as a natural progression to their sporting endeavours.389

Nor did sport, in whatever form, appear as brutal as outright warfare,

so while Kipling was condemning the British for their “bestial thirst

for blood” on foreign soil, the rules of the game softened the effect

back home, where the myth that Britain was not a military nation

was still being perpetuated.390 Sport was seen as a force for social

384 Turner, 2011: 80. 385 Searle, 2004: 305, citing journalist Arnold White. 386 Stephenson, 2000: 134. See above at p.80. 387 Ray, 2012: 25. 388 The 1899 magazine of Pocklington School, The Pocklingtonian, records that “Mr Davies sang the new patriotic song, “Brothers-in-Arms” so well, that but for a group of masters clustered round the door, the whole school would doubtless have rushed out to enlist.” 389 Hewison, 1989: 99. 390 Kipling, The Light that Failed, quoted in Paris, 2000: 48; see also Paris, 2000: 78.

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change.391 Children of all ages were encouraged to follow the pursuit

by engaging in board games such as With “Our Bobs” to Pretoria

(fig.49), where a list of the rules was followed by the patriotic

exhortation “God Save the Queen”.392 The ruthless undercurrent that

Britain had “largely defined itself by fighting” was subsumed by the

“rightness” of the imperial cause.393 Between engagements, as in the

Crimea, sport continued to be the leisure activity of choice among

the troops, as if “dodging Boer shells did not afford sufficient

exercise” and both officers and men participated in “polo and other

athletic games”.394 Nevertheless, the warlike intent was ever present

as the refrain: “[b]y War, red War, the lands we won, we’ll hold”

makes clear.395 Even Butler’s pacifist brother-in-law Wilfrid

Meynell, wrote that “[s]port and battle have each a share in the

aspiration, gravity and happiness of a worthy fight as an Englishman

understands it”.396

Press and Propaganda

“YOU FURNISH PAPERS. I WILL FURNISH WAR”, wrote the

American newspaper owner, William Hearst to his artist Remington

in 1898, for “nothing sold papers like a good war”, especially when

accompanied by copious illustrations.397 This was equally true of the

British public which by now was a literate and “newspaperised

people.”.398 The fact that imaginative reconstructions of engagements

appeared in the press gave them the stamp of authenticity, even with

391 Watson, Weir and Friend, 2005: u/p [2-8]. 392 British Library: 1865.c.2; Boer or Briton-A New War Game also became available in 1900. 393 Colley, 1994: 9. 394 Burleigh, 1900: 223, 225; Wollen commented in 1900 that “the all prevailing sand was a hindrance to good play, as often a man would miss his kick owing to the clouds of dust kicked up”, Wollen, 1900: 115; Burleigh commented that “the programme was as varied and interesting as that of the Royal Tournament, Islington”; see also Cunningham, 1981: 26 quoting a London Cyclist Volunteer who opined they “call it patriotism, but I think it is principally a desire for sport”. 395 Mangan, 1986: 124, citing The Fettesian. 396 Springhall, 1986: 64. 397 Johnson, 1978: 6, 163. 398 Stearn, 1986:139, citing William Russell.

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the general lack of first-hand knowledge of the scenes the artists

were dramatically working up, and in a manner over which the

original “Special” had no control.

Victorian periodicals had for some time devoted a great deal of space

to the subject of artistic representation and at the start of the war, as

part of a propaganda exercise, articles were written exhorting battle

artists to respond to the challenge by producing uplifting works of

art.399 War, it was felt, readily lent itself to the perception that art as a

medium was able to transcend barriers of class with an immediacy

not so available to the written word.400 By this, the periodicals had in

mind a more positive approach to the conflict. Paintings in the

manner of Butler’s Balaclava (1876) and The Remnants of an Army,

(1879) once heralded by Punch as “the picture of the year”, with

their emphasis on heroic failure were now criticised for being

evasive in character and were no longer favoured.401 Nor were the

urgings of the Peace party to be taken seriously, for “[p]reachings on

canvas against the strife of battle have always been in vain, and a

gallery of pictures by Delacroix will not prevent a people rushing

into war”.402 According to Carter in the Art Annual of 1900, the

conflict in South Africa revealed “the fierce naked light of war” in

which there was “[n]o question of ‘art for art’s sake’”, for war was

serious business.403 Instead artists were expected to reinforce the

concept of manliness through the portrayal of war heroes, for art,

alongside literature, had become a vehicle for enhancing the late-

nineteenth-century male, just as the country was waking up to the

idea that Britain might indeed be a military nation.404 Extolling the

“indomitable coolness” of the British infantrymen as portrayed by

Woodville, Carter’s conclusion to his work, notwithstanding the high

rejection rate of would-be recruits, was that “[n]o one can look 399 Roberts, 1982: 80. 400 Brockington, 2010: 6. 401 Punch, 24 May 1879: 229; Hichberger, 1988: 115-16. 402 Carter, 1900: 30. 403 Carter, 1900: 1. 404 Mangan, 1987: 14.

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through the drawings and sketches in this Annual without feeling that

the fighting stock of the nation has suffered no deterioration”.405

When disaster followed disaster, newspaper editorials initially

viewed them as temporary, pronouncing as late as Christmas 1901

that “[w]e shall all come right in the end, never fear”.406 Attention

was diverted from a growing public anxiety as to Britain’s decline in

world domination by laying great emphasis on positive aspects, such

as the apparent willingness of the dominions to come to the

assistance of the “mother” country.407 At the same time, the British

government received preferential treatment from the South African

branch of Reuters influential press agency, so much so that it

virtually “became an agent of imperial publicity”.408 Similarly, artists

took pains to avoid disasters unless they were able to highlight

valiant behaviour, and instead looked for incidents which showed

small victories, or manoeuvres with no danger to British troops.

Charlton’s earlier painting, Placing the Guns representing a routine

military manoeuvre, was followed by his more patriotic, Routed:

Boers Retreating (fig.50) in 1900 which, typically, illustrates his skill

in depicting horses, as the Boers surge chaotically forward. Here was

something to applaud as the nearest mounted Boer is seen turning

round anxiously in his saddle to watch his pursuers, while several

others are whipping their mounts in desperation to reach safety. To

the right of the main figure, a white, riderless horse indicates the

success of the British attack. When exhibited at the Royal Academy,

Charlton was praised by the critics in the art press for his topicality,

with the commentary that the Boers were “past masters in the art of

making off in time to save their bacon”.409 It certainly made good

propaganda material at a time when every little achievement in South

Africa was hailed as a victorious success. As Hichberger comments, 405 Carter, 1900: 25. 406 Punch, 25 December, 1901: 459. 407 Beaumont, 2000: 75. 408 Nalbach, 2003: 77; Reuters’ general manager was replaced in November 1899 when it was feared he was too sympathetic to the Boers. 409 Harrington, 1993: 277.

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this type of painting heralded a shift from the emphasis on the purely

moral qualities of the British to a more aggressive attitude, designed

to achieve success and which required no justification.410

By Spring 1900, however, in some quarters of the press, enthusiasm

for the war was already beginning to pall. The Boers had not

received their promised “licking”; instead William Burdett-Coutts

for The Times was sending in reports of the awful reality of war in

terms which mirrored Russell’s before Sebastopol in the winter of

1855.411 The terrible events of “Black Week” in December 1899 had

already caused many to question both the purpose and the handling

of the war and with the facts of the campaign becoming increasingly

apparent, the press became less vocal, The Times offering support to

the government only if it “would get on with winning the war”.412

Similarly, whereas at the outset battle painters had been called upon

to present the war in suitably positive terms, after Black Week, with

its succession of disasters, it was difficult to find any topical subjects

which did not reflect catastrophe.413

By 1902, the critic of the Art Journal was firmly of the view that as

for “the war, whether in actuality, in journalism, or in picture, we

have had enough-enough, that is, save in the domain of great

accomplishment. The war pictures, pure and simple, are almost a

negligible quantity at the Academy.”414 Those few which were

reviewed included The Victory of Paardeberg (1902) (private

collection) by J. Prinsep Beadle (1863-1947), highlighting “an

incident associated with the first noteworthy triumph of British arms

in South Africa” where the Boers had “succumbed to the inevitable”,

410 Hichberger, 1988: 117. 411 Searle, 2004: 280. 412 Beaumont, 2000: 76. The Times carried no report on Emily Hobhouse’s findings and commended farm burnings as it was believed they would shorten the war, Beaumont, 2000: 79. 413 Hichberger, 1988: 116, where she writes that there were no paintings exhibited after December 1899 which represented disaster, but this ignores those paintings already discussed of ‘The Last Stand’ genre. 414 Art Journal, 1902: 206.

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Victoria Cross by Wollen and The Morning (1902) (Bushey Museum

and Art Gallery) by Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869-1958), a somewhat

sentimental study of a horse by his dead rider, reminiscent of

Barker’s Crimean painting of Captain Nolan.

This war-weariness may go some way to explain the extreme paucity

of pictures showing bad behaviour by the British, notwithstanding

the awful conditions in concentration camps. Exceptionally,

Woodville did produce one illustration entitled Burning the Farm of

a Treacherous Burgher (fig.51) after a sketch by Prior, which shows

an armed British soldier confronting a Boer woman against a

background of flames.415 In spite of this much condemned practice,

Woodville was keen to justify the policy of farm burning by using

the image to reflect badly on so-called devious actions by the Boers

as the title indicates. Thus, while the soldiers, relying on the white

flag fluttering in the background, are confronted by a solitary

woman, she is in defiant mode, with fist raised. In direct contrast the

lead soldier has dismounted and carries his rifle harmlessly by his

side, though he tacitly ignores the plumes of black smoke issuing

from the rear of the farmhouse. In With the Flag to Pretoria this

drawing is renamed A Painful Duty, with the accompanying caption In the earlier part of the campaign in the Orange Free State, great leniency was shown to the Boers, even when they treacherously fired from houses flying the white flag. This dishonourable practice, however, became so prevalent that sterner measures were forced upon the British generals, and the order was given that houses used for such dastardly purposes should be burnt and their contents confiscated.416

When reproduced in Attridge in 2003, the same print bears the title,

British Troops Committing Atrocities Abroad.417 Generally, however,

it was left to Boer and amateur British photography to reproduce

more faithfully some of the more terrible events on the ground,

supported by reports from Emily Hobhouse on the conditions of 415 This is reproduced in Creswicke, 1901: 128. 416 Wilson, 1901: 582. 417 Attridge, 2003: 93 (figure 4.1).

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women and children reproduced in the Manchester Guardian.

Unusually Punch cartoonists appear to have ignored such atrocities

completely, restricting their criticisms to the Government’s

prevarication and blundering.418

The Pro-Boers

During this period Butler carried on painting “through thick and

thin”, although it was not until after the war in 1903 that she

exhibited any oil paintings on a Boer War theme.419 As she herself

commented in her autobiography, she liked her themes to “mature”

and generally rejected the impulse shown by Woodville for

topicality.420 Within Sound of the Guns (fig.52) shows a solitary

dispatch rider to the front of the canvas, dramatically pursued by

Boer marksmen, and who, although not engaged in face to face

fighting, is clearly in danger, as his expression and body language

show and there is some suggestion that this image of a solo rider was

inspired by General Butler’s isolated position following his forced

resignation in South Africa.421 Butler records that her painting was

“admirably placed this time at Burlington House” and, having

experienced the light in South Africa for herself, she expresses her

satisfaction in her great improvement of tone.422 Certainly in her

depiction of the extremely rocky terrain, Butler’s palette moves from

warm reds for the sharper stones at the extreme left of the painting to

a softer, smoother, greyer, landscape as the ground rises to the level

of the scout. The path the rider follows is narrow, rocky and dusty,

the pale dust kicked up by the horse merging into the background of

418 See, for example the cartoon headed To be well shaken, where John Bull is seen shaking a sleeping Lord Salisbury, saying “Look here! Wake up! I want this war over. You tell me what more I can do and I’ll do it.” Punch, 2 October, 1901: 245. The Times blamed poor Boer hygiene for widespread disease in the camps and the Daily Mail held pro-Boers responsible for allowing the war to drag on so long, Beaumont, 2000: 72. 419 Butler, 1993: 219. 420 Butler, 1993: 146. 421 Irish Arts Review, winter 2013-14: 123. 422 Butler, 1993: 238.

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smooth domed hills, dwarfed in turn by a high peaked pale blueish

mountain, dissolving into the sky. Immediately to the rear of the

scout is a second, nearer, flat topped mountain sloping down to the

left of the canvas, where its sharp ridge catches the peachy dawn

sunlight against the blue and white shades of the sky. The summit

resembles a volcano from which soft clouds billow up, ranging from

white, white with a touch of yellow, taupe, grey, pinky taupe and

finally dark grey off to the top right hand corner of the canvas,

providing an effective foil for the scout, silhouetted against a light,

but subtly warm-toned backdrop. It is almost as if Butler, by

concentrating on her colour and tone, has deliberately avoided her

earlier social commentary on war.

Butler’s Yeomanry Scouts on the Veldt (1903) (fig.53) recreates the

vastness of the countryside and illustrates the difficulties of this type

of guerilla warfare where mounted infantry can travel miles without

sight of their opponents. Here, the Boers can be seen in the distance

as the British troops wheel round ready for the chase. Although the

men are wearing khaki, the colouring is subtle, with warm orange-

brown and green scrubland broken up by soft grey rocks and an

interesting ripple effect as the men pass over the water. The figure on

the extreme left pointing out the Boers is slightly unfocussed in the

strong light, and prefigures the shimmering photographic effects of

David Lean’s 1962 desert-based film Lawrence of Arabia. Set

against a large sky with cumulus clouds tinged with pink, grey and

brown fading into a radiant white to the left of the canvas, this

painting has a warmth of tone absent from the cruder paintings of

Woodville and Giles, a painting where Butler privileges her palette

over dramatic interest and where she continues to construct her

paintings meticulously, taking care to ensure they meet her artistic

standards, and they show none of the looser, hastier paintings of

Woodville in particular.

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Neither painting displays any anti-war imagery, nor do they adopt

the “death and glory” style which had become popular with Butler’s

contemporaries. Where these paintings differ from her earlier work is

in the subject matter. Instead of showing the devastating effect after a

military encounter, such as in Balaclava, she treads a very narrow

line between patriotism and conflict, confining her artistic output to

safe, uncontroversial subject matters where the psychological drama

or urgency of her earlier works is absent or muted, a point picked up

by the Art Journal critic who commented of the first of these

paintings that “Lady Butler scarcely keeps up her reputation”.423 In

Yeomanry Scouts on the Veldt it is impossible to see the emotional

effect of the chase, while in Within Sound of the Guns, although there

is evident tension on the scout’s face, it indicates tremor rather than

trauma.

I suggest that much of the reason for this change in approach was

attributable rather to Butler’s personal difficulties in reconciling her

patriotic love of her country with her home circumstances, than to

any change in belief.424 Not only was her sister firmly situated within

the peace lobby, but Butler’s husband was said to be “the best abused

man” in the country for his non-militaristic stance in South Africa.425

William Butler had already made his views on artistic subjects clear

to his wife, such as in his comment on her painting The Defence of

Rorke’s Drift, showing actual conflict, warning her that “one more

picture like this and you will drive me mad”, and is believed to have

influenced her choice of subject-matter on several occasions.426 He

423 Art Journal, 1903: 175. 424 She refers to her “consuming zeal” for painting during this period, Butler, 1993: 219. 425 Butler, 1911: 456. For further reading on General Butler see McCourt, 1967. 426 Kestner, 1995: 199, 208. William Butler clearly disapproved of Butler’s 1885 painting After the Battle-Tel-el-Kebir as he believed that the victory in which he was personally involved had been overwhelmingly one-sided and that “it gave the God Jingo a new start”. Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 87-88; Butler is said to have subsequently destroyed this painting. William Butler wrote his essay A Plea for the Peasant, criticising the British army’s practice of forced recruitment in Ireland in 1879 and it was believed to be under her husband’s influence that Butler painted her Irish themed pictures, Evicted (1880) and, in the year of her marriage,

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was certainly a man of very strong views, and although he would not

have classified himself as part of the peace campaign, his lifelong

belief in the right of a free people to regulate their own affairs led

him into direct conflict with Alfred Milner, Governor-General at the

Cape, almost immediately after his appointment as Commander-in

Chief.427 Even before this, he had made no secret of his views, when

he wrote in 1880 of the “manifest injustice” following the Zulu

war.428 Once in South Africa he made it clear that war against the

Boers was unnecessary and that in any event, the British army at the

Cape was undermanned. Writing to Chamberlain in June 1899,

Milner, who favoured war, describes “[t]he General. He is too awful”

and within days he was reporting that Butler “is unfortunately quite

out of sympathy with my policy” and that “cordial cooperation

between us is impossible”.429 Butler resigned his post in August 1899

and returned to Britain, a convenient scapegoat, and as an army

officer, denied the right of reply. His wife writes in melancholy

mood in her autobiography of this “dark period” in their lives,

“brought about by the malice of those in power there and at

home”.430

By November 1899, the Daily Mail was writing that “[a]ll the world

knows that Sir William showed himself-to be a pro-Boer”, while

Alice Meynell writes that “insults reach poor William by post-

Listed for the Connaught Rangers, (1877) Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 72. 427 General Butler’s commanding officer, Wolseley commented that had Butler “lived in mediaeval times, he would have been the knight errant of everyone in distress”. Leslie, 51: 97. Butler’s daughter, Eileen, records that her father “set his face inflexibly against the party that was working for war” in South Africa, Gormanston, 1953: 31. 428 Kestner, 1995: 198-99. 429 Headlam, 1931: 425, 445; Milner’s diary entry for 24 June 1899 records “Butler or I will have to go.” Headlam, 1931: 510; Arthur Balfour refused to publish correspondence between Butler and the War Office, HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 41 and it was later revealed at the public inquiry that certain pages of correspondence had been removed, R.C.Cmnd 1791: 13424. 430 Butler, 1993: 217. He was warned against travelling to greet the Queen in Bristol for fear of reprisals.

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accusations of accepting bribes from Kruger”.431 Interestingly,

Punch, while failing to highlight British atrocities, similarly failed to

caricature Butler, somewhat surprisingly restricting itself to the odd

comment on the Pro-Boers towards the end of the war.432 In spite of

his subsequent vindication in the Royal Commission on the War in

South Africa, it was Elizabeth Butler’s view that her husband never

really recovered from the injustice he felt he had suffered, and one

which she, as an intensely loyal wife, shared. I suggest that any

attempt by her to produce paintings with an anti-war theme would

have only compounded the widespread view that both she and her

husband were pro-Boer and unpatriotic and that it was too risky for

her to attempt. In that sense, her relationship became “more

oppositional, less comfortable and easy with the assumptions and

protocols which the institutions” she had previously worked within

“existed to perpetuate”.433 Her response was to both restrict her

output and to keep a low profile. It is interesting to speculate what,

without such marital constraints, she would have produced during

this period.434

At the outset of the war, it had not been easy to raise a voice in

opposition to military action, and the press had enjoyed a great deal

of success in its campaign to discredit the so-called “pro-Boers”. In

fact, this term was something of a misnomer, as many falling within

this group were not in favour of the Boers as such; rather, they were

simply anti-war.435 They comprised a markedly disparate group of

individuals and societies, with no effective leadership, but with that

431 Cited in McCourt, 1967: 232; Meynell, 1929: 166; Davey records how he was

told by Patrick Butler how his father was ridiculed in music hall shows of What the Butler Saw, Davey, 1978: 53 (f/n).

432 See for example Punch, 11 December 1901: 425. 433 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 8.

434 See Usherwood who attributes her decline to her marriage which “brought in its train the duties of child-rearing [. . .] and the requirement to travel to distant parts of the globe”, alongside the influence of her husband in her choice of subjects, Usherwood, 2004: 132. 435 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a friend of Alice and Wilfrid Meynell, expressed the view that as between the two great white thieves”, his sympathies were with the Boers, Finch, 1938: 304.

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one thought in common and came generally, but not exclusively,

from a liberal or pacifist intelligentsia background.436 The term “pro-

Boer” was, I suggest, chosen deliberately for its emotive quality and

became more derogatory than “pro-German” in either World War

One or World War Two.437 Once adopted, it soon became a vehicle

with which to castigate all those regarded as unpatriotic and to link

them with the alleged bad behaviour of the Boers, so much so, that

any expression of anti-war sentiment could place the author in

physical danger.438 Several artists living in Britain at the time,

including James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Walter Crane

(1845-1915), were actively pro-Boer, some creating startling pacifist

images as Jo Briggs has demonstrated, while others felt obliged to

keep a low profile on their trips abroad.439 Albert Rothenstein (1881-

1953), for example, wrote to his parents from Amsterdam that

“[p]atriotic feeling for the Boers runs very high here”, describing an

evening at the opera, when clowns dressed up as Chamberlain and

Kruger to the respective boos and cheers of the audience.440 In the

month before the war, a peace rally in Trafalgar Square, later

ironically referred to as “The Battle of Trafalgar”, had been

disrupted by bricks and rotten fruit following publicised allegations

from the press of treason, and it was not until June 1901 that,

according to H.W.Nevinson, it was possible for supporters to “go to

a pro-Boer meeting with [their] best trousers on”.441 When it came to

the 1900 “Khaki Election”, even in the face of obvious military

setbacks, the government won on Chamberlain’s blatantly

propagandist slogan that “[e]very vote given against the Government

436 As Dunae notes, the Baptists were the only religious organisation to oppose the war systematically. 437 Lowry, 2000: 3. 438 See for example the account in the Friend, 1 June 1900, vol. XL, No 22: 337. While not all Quakers were anti-war at that time, many did stand in personal danger and there are several accounts of meetings being violently broken up, Hewison, 1989: 116-17. 439 Briggs, 2007: 18 onwards; C.R.W.Nevinson also writes of the backlash he suffered as a child as a result of his father’s pro-Boer stance, Nevinson, 1937: 4. 440 Brockington, 2009: 316-17 who notes that Whistler was seen to be so aggressively pro-Boer that his friends feared for his safety. 441 Hewison, 1989: 117; Laity, 2001: 153, 165, quoting a diary entry for H.W. Nevinson.

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is a vote given to the Boers”, and voters were exhorted to choose

between the Queen or President Kruger.442

While Woodville and most other war artists continued to promote a

patriotic view of the conflict, several poets fell into the pro-Boer

camp and between them produced some of the most interesting and

thoughtful poetry of the period. William Watson (1858-1935) and

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) both wrote a series of critical verse,

warning of the dangers of imperial ambition, while Crosland’s

powerful poem Slain clearly anticipates the later work of Wilfred

Owen.443 Some may have been influenced by Stephen Crane’s anti-

war novel, The Red Badge of Courage, published after the American

Civil War, whose hero subverts the romantic ideal of a soldier in a

parody of war fiction.444 As the war progressed, Kipling, too,

changed his outlook to the point where he came not only to apologise

for failure in South Africa, but also to doubt Britain’s imperial

mission in his poem The Lesson.445 The tone of poets, and journalists

alike began to reflect the recognition of a shift in world power which

laid the foundations for a more vociferous pacifist campaign in the

period leading up to 1914, a movement this group of military artists

was a little slower to follow.446

What can be said for these late-Victorian battle artists is that

although they failed to comment critically on the progress of the war

in South Africa, they were part of “a shared and developing

response” to a fin-de-siècle cultural situation for which they strove to

provide a new visual language.447 I suggest that the then peculiar

combination of military circumstances and national anxieties led to a

less psychologically insightful representation of the soldier than in

Butler’s paintings of the Crimean War, but of the individual soldier 442 Schneer, 1999: 229. 443 See Wyk Smith, 1978: 113 for the poem in full. 444 Pizer, 1994: 161. 445 Attridge, 2003: 88-89. 446 Brockington, 2010: 7. 447 Peters-Corbett, 2004: 16.

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nevertheless, though an individual who does not evoke sympathy.

Instead, he epitomises the spirit of manly adventure as he takes on

the world, anticipating the wartime heroes of, in particular, the

Second World War (1939-45) which, notably in films, continue to be

promulgated into the twenty-first century. Whilst the artistic

representations of the Boer War may, to a modern audience, smack

of the taint of the adventure story, I argue that the approach of these

artists fulfilled a useful transitional purpose insofar as it allowed for

just that necessary element of self-delusion at the end of an era when

the empire was on the verge of disintegration. The Boer War was a

shock to the country, and as Britain moved forward into the twentieth

century seeking to make sense of its position in the world, these

images provided that small amount of reassurance which allowed for

a breathing-space between self-delusion and reality at a time of

national, but largely subliminal anxiety.

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CHAPTER THREE

RELINQUISHING SCARLET

Alongside the artistic challenges presented by this new guerilla type

of warfare, Woodville and his contemporaries had far more than an

invisible enemy to deal with in the execution of their paintings. The

Boers may have been dressed in dull, dark colours and for the most

part hidden in trenches or behind trees, but the British soldier, too,

was no longer to be seen on the field in his bright scarlet uniform.

Following the disasters of the Zulu wars in the 1870s scarlet had

been replaced by workaday khaki, with the more vibrant colours

reserved exclusively for display. Military artists could no longer rely

on the magnificent trappings of a Victorian war to enhance their

paintings. Hussars, stripped of their elaborately distinctive pélisses

were now virtually indistinguishable from lancers without their

shakos, whilst infantry appeared to merge into cavalry.448 Although

some critics, including the Royal Academy, welcomed the move

away from scarlet, observing in 1880 that [w]e have heard more than once of the impossibility of finding a satisfactory presentment of the scarlet coat of the British soldier, and it must, indeed, be allowed that the subject has been the occasion of much disastrous failure,449

most queried whether it was possible for khaki to “lend itself to the

treatment of the brush” when the “varied hues of all the uniforms

will be changed for one garb, worn alike by all forces from all parts

of the Empire”.450 A new way of conveying the sense of battle was

required, one that relied more on dynamic action, as in Saving the

Guns at Maiwand, monumentality, as in All That Was Left of Them

448 Pélisses were the short swagger coats worn from one shoulder by the hussars in the nineteenth century and shakos, the tall hats of the lancers. 449 Harrington, 1993: 192 citing The Academy, 20 May 1880. 450 Harrington, 1993: 276. In fact, when khaki was first introduced it was anything but uniform, one commentator remarking that although at the Siege of Delhi almost all the troops were in khaki “it was of so many different shades-puce colour, slate colour, drab, etc.-that a delightful variety was exhibited”, Abler, 1999: 117.

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or psychological intensity as previously used by Butler in the Roll

Call.

At the same time photography, both amateur and professional, was

on the increase. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the

Victorian public had become fascinated by this new technology,

keeping abreast of the many developments.451 Kodak box cameras

were available for the amateur photographer from the 1880s,

culminating in the popular “Brownie” in 1900, just in time for use by

many of the troops in South Africa.452 Photography was becoming a

“democratic art”.453 A contemporary Punch cartoon shows a young

lady handing her fiancé a camera with the injunction to send “a good

view of a nice battle”, adding that if he could take a shot “just at the

moment of victory, I should like it all the better”.454 The “Biograph”,

or moving newsreel, a modern panorama, was introduced in 1895,

promising timely reportage of contemporaneous events.455 Even

more significantly for the news from South Africa, William Dickson

had founded his British Biograph company in 1897 and was able to

record his account of filming in the war in the first book ever

published by a film cameraman, even though it was still not

technically possible to film battle-scenes in action.456 These were left

for re-enaction by theatres, music halls and fairgrounds.457 The

military authorities, too, were becoming interested in using the

camera for topographical purposes reconnaissance and checking on

equipment, so as war broke out, the stage looked set for a

comprehensive photographic record. Battles could no longer be

451 Ruskin had experimented with daguerrotypes and believed photography to be a miraculous invention, though not capable of capturing a real likeness in nature. 452 Lee, 1985: 6-10; as evidence of its popularity nearly 150,000 “Brownies” were sold outside America between 1900 and 1902. 453 Hodgson, 1974: 12; Gervais, 2010: 375. 454 Hodgson, 1974: 11. 455 Lee, 1985: 6. 456 Dickson, 1995: vi. 457 Thompson, 2002: 103; see the entertainment on offer at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester under the title ‘The War Boerograph-Life Motioned Pictures. Actual Battle Scenes Taken under Fire’. Harrington, 1993: 294. One theatre proprietor added drama to the scenes by firing blank cartridges.

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represented by a single view and were more accurately understood

through a sequence of images, and as Thierry Gervais has noted, the

order on a page of such images “conferred the status of war spectator

on the reader and emphasized its ongoing process” much as in a

film.458 “The demand for slides connected with the war in South

Africa is growing apace” wrote G.R.Baker in the British Journal of

Photography in December 1899, urging photographers to publish

their work “for the martial spirit of the country is aroused”.459

Focussing on the aesthetics of khaki and the depiction of military

uniform, this chapter examines the effect of these changes on the

works of Woodville and his contemporaries, how they responded to

them by focussing on the dramatic or the monumental and how such

changes were perceived by art critics and the general public. It

considers how contrast was used wherever possible, for example in

the presentation of the Sudanese in Woodville’s The Charge of the

21st Lancers at Omdurman as a foil to the heroism of the drably clad

British soldier, and how, in turn, khaki became increasingly

fashionable amongst civilian and military personnel. Against this is

set an exploration of the effectiveness of photography alongside

difficulties encountered in the field in terms of the natural conditions,

the ubiquitous khaki sand, and the censorship imposed by Lord

Kitchener which prevented many a photograph reaching Britain.

While some artists felt that photography would replace their work,

especially for the press, others believed that the pencil would always

prevail. It is significant that more than a century later, Jules George,

a war artist working in Afghanistan in 2004, echoed these

sentiments, comparing the essentially ephemeral rolling footage of

news, photographs and film unfavourably to the “more meditative

quality” of paintings hanging in the relaxed atmosphere of a gallery

“where you can really ponder what’s going on”.460 458 Gervais, 2010: 378-81. 459 Hodgson, 1974: 28. 460 George in discussion with Jenny Alexander, Assistant Curator of Fine Art, York Art Gallery on 28 July 2011.

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Gentlemen in Khaki: “a Richer Dust”461

I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well-and indeed so I do still at heart; and if a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year should want one of my girls, I shall not say nay to him, and I thought Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William’s in his regimentals.462

A constant challenge for the battle painter had always been the

accurate representation of military uniform, not only in terms of the

correct braiding and accoutrements, but also in respect of an accurate

representation of the colour. The frisson which accompanied

European armies into battle in the first half of the nineteenth century

was undoubtedly enhanced by the shimmering glamour of their

colourful uniforms. When visiting Paris in 1874 Butler talks of “the

Empire of my childhood, with its endless variety of uniforms, its

buglings, and drummings, and trumpetings, its chic and glitter and

swagger”.463 On her return, she found the red coats of the British

army both magnificent and “very trying” to reproduce, sometimes

appearing “blackish-purple here, pale salmon colour there”,

according to the changing light, ageing process and weather

conditions.464 She was not the only voice to express trepidation as to

the effectiveness of representing military scarlet. Detaille had told

Butler that the French did not paint the British army, although he

would like to, because “the red frightens us”.465 Writing in 1898,

Robert de la Sizeranne commented adversely on the “violent”

colours used by English painters, in particular, “the raw-red of the

soldiers’ uniforms, the flaunting red of the letter-boxes, the vinous

461 The Soldier by Rupert Brooke. 462 Austen, 1972: 76. 463 Butler, 1993: 103. 464 Butler, 1993: 103. 465 Butler, 1993: 206; in the event, De Neuville did paint the British Army in their scarlet uniforms, as evidenced by his exhibit for the 1915 Guildhall Art exhibition, Tel-el-Kebir.

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red of the shoe-blacks, the sealing-wax red of parasols and omnibus

advertisements”.466

By the time of this comment the army had already turned to khaki,

firstly in India, before its use became more widespread towards the

end of the century with General Wolseley’s positive endorsement

that “soldiers should not be clothed in tissues of glaring colour

visible at great distances, and which furnish to the enemy convenient

targets”.467 Though in some quarters, camouflage was regarded as

unsportsmanlike and shameful, khaki was now the preferred choice

for the professionals, the working soldiers whose lives were at

stake.468 As weapons were becoming more effective and long range,

the ability to keep out of sight of the enemy was an increasingly

pressing requirement.469 What clearly made operational sense,

however, brought with it new and particular visual challenges for the

artist.

Initially a by-product of Indian colonial rule, whence it derived its

name from the Persian word for dust, khaki was being used in

conflicts against other subjects of the Empire in South Africa,

emphasising the tension between imperial power and visual

culture.470 By the end of the century it had become recognised as a

permanent feature of British society as evidenced by the so-called

“Khaki Election” of 1900 and John Burns’ condemnation of the

government’s warlike stance as “khaki clad, khaki mad and khaki

bad”.471 One retailer even offered “khaki crackers”, the “most

466 Cited by Peters-Corbett, 2004: 33; Sizeranne attributes this in part to the effect of fog on the artists’ sensibilities which in turn acted as a foil to accentuate the brightness of the palette. 467 Moriarty, 2011: 306. 468 Lee, 1985: 30; Abler, 1999: 120, who cites Hills in reporting that ‘the new-fangled uniform positively drove the men of one regiment to drink’, so much so, that they refused to leave the barracks for shame at their appearance. 469 See Moriarty, 2011: 307. 470 Early experimentation in khaki cloth included the use of cow dung, Moriarty, 20: 307 and curry powder, Abler, 1999: 118; see also Bailkin, 2005: 197-216 for a fuller analysis of issues of colour and Empire; Barthes, 2000: 30. 471 Searle, 2004: 287; ILN, 11 May 1901.

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popular novelty of the season”, for sale at Christmas as a testament

to the commodification of the new fashion.472 Khaki uniforms with

their military associations proved to have the capacity to turn young

girls’ heads and had in their own way become alluring in what

Catherine Moriarty has referred to as “khaki’s poetics”.473 Soldiers’

uniforms, however challenging for artists, were now an issue which

had to be addressed. In 1902 the Illustrated London News was

praising Bacon for showing “artistic bravery in the face of khaki

which no military bravery of the enemy could surpass” in his Royal

Academy entry Your Sovereign, the Empire, this Imperial City are

Satisfied (Guildhall Art Gallery), which shows the return of the City

Imperial Volunteers “in full strength” where the “upturned faces-in

great concourse-are treated with as much variety as if everyone was a

portrait”.474

The khaki of the Boer War was the khaki of sand and dust, that

particular hue which adapted well to the conditions encountered by

the army in the hot, dry climate of the South African Veldt. A dusty

sand was everywhere in this theatre of war; it was both insignificant

and chameleon-like, at times engulfing, absorbing, signalling danger

to the lost scout or solitary survivor, at others supporting, moulding

itself sculpturally around the bodies of the men as they burrowed

down into it for comfort and security. It could blow fiercely,

blindingly, into their faces, under their eyelids, into their ears,

nostrils and hair or, when wet, cling heavily to their legs as they

crossed rivers and lakes in an eerie forecast of the muddy trenches on

the Western Front. Sand was infinitely mobile, both ephemeral and

solid, as it made its way into all the soldiers’ bodily orifices, as they

ingested its fine particles with their food and inhaled it with their

breath. It seeped into their very pores and was expelled with their

sweat, coating their skins with its dusty, khaki, film. Paradoxically, 472 Thompson, 2002: 101. 473 Woollacott, 1994: 325-47; Moriarty, 2010: 305. 474 ILN, 17 May 1902. This painting is also known as The City Imperial Volunteers in the Guildhall, London, 1900.

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as Kate Flint has demonstrated, dust was simultaneously

indispensable and problematic; it was both destructive, clogging up

the mechanism of firearms and photographic equipment, and

preservative, as evidenced by archaeological remains.475 What

seemed initially of little consequence was in fact the reverse, for, in

short, it was the backdrop to their every living activity, and in death

it buried them. It resonated with the biblical prophecy, “for dust

though art and unto dust shalt thou return” for the “Lord God formed

the man from the dust of the ground”; dust was the basic substance

of humanity, and, as such, was shared equally by officers and men.476

As Moriarty has noted, as the bodies of the soldiers decayed in the

sand, so they, in their khaki uniforms, merged into the dust in which

they were submerged.477 The very texture of the sand, its materiality,

its gritty, irritating, quality, was mirrored in the ropey roughness of

the unrefined cloth of the soldiers’ khaki uniforms.

Like these particles of dusty sand, the “eternal khaki” was

everywhere, as Graphic illustrator Villiers noted, complaining that

“men, guns, even the business end of a lance is painted khaki-no

pennant, no distinction regarding grade; all one dust hue”.478 Sand

affected artists and photographers alike and in his account of filming,

Dickson complained that “a furious dust storm has arisen, and it is all

we can do to hold down our tent and breathe. We are suffocated, and

can only fill our lungs with air by breathing through a

handkerchief.”479 Writing in December 1900, Wollen commented

that “[o]nly those who for two or three months were stationed at

Modder River or De Aar know what sand really is, what it really can

do, and to what depths of misery and contemplation of suicide it can

475 Flint, 2000: 40-63. 476 Genesis, 3: 19, 2:7. 477 Moriarty, 2010: 312. 478 Harrington, 1993: 277. 479 Dickson, 1995: 96.

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lead a man”.480 In the same year, a cartoon in Punch entitled “Echoes

of War” was showing a soldier who had caught a locust saying to his

fellow trooper, “Look ‘ere Bill. This is a rummy country.’Ere’s the

blooming butterflies in khaki!”481

Wollen, in a subsequent interview for the Regiment, complained that

“[t]he present war in South Africa has not furnished much material

for war artists” for “the old stage properties and effects that made

war so stirring” had disappeared, leaving in their place soldiers “in

fighting garb of dull drab”.482 No longer could the supposedly full-

blooded character of the British soldier be represented by the

exceptionally glamorous scarlet of earlier Victorian uniforms.

Photographic equipment too was subjected to camouflage as, for

example, the telephotographic apparatus of one Corporal Ford, and

his bicycle, which were both painted khaki.483 Wearing khaki

confirmed the equality of men and officers as they offered their

bodies up for combat, and reinforced their patriotism through this

more sober attire.484 Never mind the different qualities of the khaki

worn, as long as they had the appearance of sameness, a “comfort in

common threads”.485 Khaki was for the business of killing and, more

important, for the avoidance of being killed.

It was clearly not easy, physically, to paint in such circumstances,

and as Butler records in her autobiography it “is very trying painting

in the desert on account of the wind, which blows the sand

perpetually into your eyes”.486 It would also be as difficult to imagine

the charge of the light brigade painted with men in khaki uniforms as

it would to imagine a cavalry charge in a guerilla war. Nevertheless,

480 Wollen, 1900: 113; this chimes evocatively with the comments of soldiers in the First World War who wrote of the demoralising effect of “stagnant rivers of brown cohesive mud”, Meyer, 2009: 131-32. 481 Punch, 14 March 1900: 190. 482 The Regiment, 15 December 1902: 308. 483 Hodgson, 1974: 29. 484 Craik, 1994: 182. 485 Moriarty, 2011: 315. 486 Butler, 1993: 156.

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this new uniform was clearly tactically useful as evidenced by

Burleigh, who was told after the Battle of Elandslaagte (1899) that

“it was impossible to see the khaki-clad infantry when they lay

down”, though Highlanders, Butler’s “splendid troops” and “so

essentially pictorial”, still “afforded the best mark” in their

resplendent tartans.487 Officers, too, could be picked out easily by

their Sam Browne belts and anachronistic swords until these were

replaced by Baden-Powell with less romantic, but more practical,

light repeating rifles.

Not everyone agreed that khaki presented insuperable challenges for

the artist. Some were curious, wondering “what artistic enterprise of

license (sic) can make out of the masses of the dull yellow gold of

khaki”.488 It was, in fact, becoming increasingly fashionable, and an

article in the Navy and Army Illustrated commented that a “khaki

uniform is no more monotonous than are successive green fields. It

will lend itself to artistic treatment”. The writer even saw positive

advantages in the new colours liberating the soldier from the “stiff

and half-conventional framework” of military scarlet.489 What this

article did not address, however, was the problem of artistic contrast

against the background of the ubiquitous sand of the Veldt.

Woodville had already tackled this issue of khaki with his 1882

painting, Saving the Guns at Maiwand (fig.8), where there was little

colour differentiation and where the interest lay in the exhilarating

drama of the painting. Even so, he had taken every opportunity of

introducing contrasting visual effects such as the blue rag on a

wound, a gorgeous blue and gold turban, white cross bands and

different colour horses. In his 1898 picture, The Charge of the 21st

Lancers at Omdurman (fig.9) said to be a “ready subject for his

artistry”, Woodville was able to contrast dramatically the more 487 Burleigh, 1900: 38, who argued that the Highlanders “should be permitted to change their kilts for the nonce”; Butler, 1993: 78. 488 Carter, 1900: 29. 489 Harrington, 1993: 276.

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restrained yellow-brown tones of the khaki uniforms by profiling the

vibrant colour combinations of a mediaeval tournament. His

representation of the imposing figure of the Dervish Commander-in-

Chief (fig.54) shows him with full black beard mirrored in the

blackish-brown of his eager horse galloping head down into the fray.

He is seated on a rich red saddlecloth, his metal gauntlets with chain

mail decoration glinting in the sun, as does his spectacular shiny

helmet.490 His dress is a white shift, a jibbeh, decorated with bands of

gold and squares of green with a chain mail trim and in his left hand

he carries a shiny round shield, in his right, a short knife which he

raises boldly across his body and over his left shoulder.491 With his

chin slightly upturned, he is eyeballing his opponent enthusiastically,

clearly relishing the impending impact. It is evident that he is the

dramatic focus of the painting and the one to which the eye is drawn,

regardless of the wealth of activity across the canvas.

The bottom right hand corner of the painting is given up to a group

of Sudanese infantry soldiers. All are dressed in white jibbeh with

some coloured markings but less rich than that of their commander,

with most wearing close fitting caps or turbans instead of helmets.492

One carries a vibrant red flag with green lettering, his sword still in

its sheath and his knife secured to his arm. He is followed by two

other Sudanese, one bearing a large round drum. In front of the flag

bearer, his companion, sporting a golden turban fastened under the

chin, is crouching forward, his spear at the ready. Next to him are

two others, kneeling, with guns; one firing so that we can see the

flame issuing red from the barrel whilst the other is reloading from a

cartridge belt. Ahead of this group, and almost under the hooves of

the Sudanese commander’s horse, another soldier, his contrasting

490 Johnson, 1978: 16. 491 Mr Crombie, conservator at Walker Art Gallery, suggested to the author that the helmet and shield could well have derived from museum pieces as they are both unusual in design. 492 Strachey writes that the followers of the Mahdi adopted the jibbeh, a shift of coarse cloth, patched with various coloured shapes as a token of austerity, Strachey, 1973: 211.

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white shift torn in the fracas, is lying on his stomach, supporting

himself by his left arm and pointing his sword upwards with his

right.

To the left of the central group can be seen mainly British lancers in

a melée of activity. In their uniform khaki, they provide an admirable

foil for their multi-coloured and striking opponents. Like the

ubiquitous black garb of the late-nineteenth-century male, the khaki

worn in the desert was a “colour without colour”, a uniform which

both facilitated contrast in artistic representation, and at the same

time made a potent statement about the status of the wearer.493 These

soldiers in their khaki uniform were powerful. As if to highlight this,

Woodville shows one British soldier thrusting forwards energetically

with his lance. Nearer the front and to the left, another soldier is

riding at full tilt, his horse’s front legs stretched out almost

horizontally while he lances an unfortunate Sudanese in the throat.

Behind him, and to the extreme left of the painting, is a further

British soldier with a spectacular moustache, fiercely shouting

encouragement as he holds his lance at the ready, his horse making

directly for the front of the canvas, eyes burning and forelock flying

in the wind. 494

I suggest that Woodville was using the colourful presence of the

Sudanese commander not just as contrast here, but also to subvert

military facts, portraying the lancers as the underdogs in this

potentially disastrous charge in an otherwise uneven contest. In fact,

Omdurman was more in the nature of a massacre by the British and

there was little heroic or glorious to celebrate. The reception of the

battle in Britain was muted, opinion divided between the urge to

celebrate a victory and distaste at the manner of its achievement. 493 Harvey, 1995: 13. There are similarities too with the emphasis on white favoured by the Aesthetic movement. 494 A plan of the many personnel has helpfully been provided by the 21st Lancers Regimental Museum identifying the major players, though with the caveat that “many were nowhere near each other and details of their dress and equipment are incorrect”, WAG: 152-letter 10/2/1986, Regimental Museum to curator.

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Woodville, acutely aware of the way a Victorian audience would

read his painting, was very keen to highlight the worthiness of the

Sudanese opponent and to use this to enhance British supremacy.

Against this colourful representation of the larger than life Sudanese

commander whose tradition of military endeavour is reflected in his

costume, stance and equipment, Woodville is able to showcase the

superior qualities of the British commander. Rather than engaging in

combat, the colonel on his pure white horse is shown to the right of

the painting, leading his troops from “the head, riding straight

through everything without sword or revolver drawn”. He is

untouchable, saintly and triumphant, like Joy’s General Gordon,

encapsulating the very essence of the qualities Woodville sought to

portray.495

Some sixteen years before Nevinson’s pronouncement that “pictures

are no longer to be static; that condition has been killed by

photography. They must become dynamic”, Woodville had

developed a mastery of action painting in a manner reflecting the

political and social atmosphere of the 1890s.496 Significantly, the

broad loose brushwork and lack of definition could be seen to

provide evidence of Woodville’s customary haste, and on closer

examination, this painting does show signs of an unfinished piece of

work, which may well indicate an over concern for topicality, for, as

the Regiment of 11 November 1899 confirms, “[t]he war artist

nowadays must be up to date with a vengeance”.497 In the current

process of conservation of the Omdurman painting it has emerged

that the action of one, at least, of the horses has been exaggerated by

loose overpainting to indicate greater speed, which could support

Sala’s criticism of Woodville as ‘slap dash’ even at this later stage in

his career. It is, however, also possible that Woodville’s seemingly 495 Kestner, 1995: 197; writing in 1918, Strachey refers to the battle as ending “very happily-in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring”. Strachey, 1973: 266. 496 C.R.W.Nevinson, cited in Haycock, 2013: 88. 497 Harrington, 1993: 277. In 1900 alone, eleven of Woodville’s paintings were reproduced as photogravures by Graves and Co., Harrington, 1993: 295.

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rushed technique, with his unequal distribution of paint, conversely

belies a more considered approach, and one whose objective is visual

spontaneity rather than speed in execution.498 One of the essential

elements of battle is the utter chaos of events which even participants

cannot sequentially remember. In this animated depiction of such

turmoil, therefore, I suggest that Woodville deliberately heightened

the effect of his composition with this more controlled energy of

brushwork by which he seems to have at least partially countered the

criticisms around his unduly rapid newspaper technique.

Certainly, in a period obsessed with time and “the seductive charm of

speed”, the illusion of haste would be attractive and have the

advantage of appearing more modern, more truthful and more

naturalistic, of a painting executed en plein air rather than from the

safety of the studio.499 It is a technique where impressionistic,

separated applications of colour privilege a more linear and

continuous line, Roger Fry’s “full liquid brushstroke”, capturing the

immediacy of the battle experience.500 It may also be a technique

better suited to warmer tones where mirages from the hot sun of the

Veldt can create visual distortions. It is no coincidence that Butler,

Ruskin’s so-called first pre-Raphaelite battle artist, was motivated to

paint Scotland Forever! (fig.48) in which she uses similar energetic

brushwork, and the dramatic colour contrast of scarlet uniforms

against the luminous white of the “greys”, in a violent reaction to an

exhibition at the “home of the ‘Aesthetes’”.501 I suggest that while

498 I am indebted to Anthea Callen for this insight, Callen, 1990: 65. This possible use by Woodville of a novel nineteenth-century French technique throws up intriguing lines of further research. This observation was made in conversation between the conservator and the author during an examination of the painting. 499 Brettell, 2000: 7; see also Nead in her discussion of “rushing and loitering”, Nead, 2010: 101-106. 500 Prettejohn, 1999: 40, citing Fry in 1903. 501 Callen, 1990: 22; Ruskin writing in Academy Notes, 1875 describing Butler’s Quatre Bras, Cook and Wedderburn, 1904: 138; Butler, 1993: 148 is describing how she came to paint Scotland Forever! It should also be noted that the controversy over “finish” was heightened during and in the wake of the Whistler v. Ruskin trial of 1877. Butler writes of her delight in her “supply of very brilliant Spanish white (blanca de plata) for those horses” in Scotland Forever! Butler, 1993: 151.

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Woodville’s drawings for the illustrated press may well justify the

accusation of being ‘slap dash’, in his paintings, the impression of

haste is considerably more calculated. It is also highly unlikely that

Woodville would have allied himself with the view that such a

subject-matter as the ordinary soldier warranted less care in

execution.502 Instead, I suggest that Woodville’s concern here was

with raising the profile of the individual soldier, emphasizing the

nobility of the men through carefully constructed gestures and body

language. Anxious to avoid any doubts as to Britain’s imperial role,

Woodville’s aim was to reflect contemporary beliefs by representing

the British soldiers’ heroism in the face of unexpectedly heavy

opposition.

With the Boers as opponents, this element of colour contrast was not

available and painters faced a new challenge. Not only were the

“enemy” of white European extraction, but they dressed in bush

clothing, usually of dark nondescript colouring, such as to blend in

with their background on those few occasions when they were at all

visible. Illustrators were in demand, but on at least one occasion, as

Harrington notes, were asked to make black and white drawings

rather than drawings in colour, and certainly the illustrated papers

covered the war extensively with monochrome renditions of work

sent in by the Specials.503 Detaille praised the “really splendid black

and white work which is being done by those who so modestly style

themselves as war specials and war sketchers”.504 Whilst interest in

the war remained high, artists continually strove to meet the demand

for pictorial representations in their different ways. Woodville

continued to portray the troops in poses of challenging defiance, or

gallantry as in Just Like Bobs (1900) (photogravure, National Army

502 Brettell, 2000: 62, writes that “[r]ough paintings” were usually “linked with low subject matter, reinforcing the notion that crudity of surface meant crudity of subject”. 503 Harrington, 1993: 276-77; Harrington quotes from a letter to this effect from William Ingram of the Illustrated London News to Allan Stewart of 11 November 1899, offering him “plenty of work”. 504 Greenwall, 1992: 51.

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Museum), showing Lord Roberts offering water to an injured Boer,

while Charlton, produced his Routed: Boers Retreating in the same

year, seeking to use his skill in painting horses to create a dynamic

and theatrical effect.505 Contemporary art reviews of Charlton’s work

were positive, the Athenaeum referring to his “extraordinary

spontaneity and singular animation” with “vehicles in all the

confusion of panic” while Spielmann confirmed that he “obviously

loves war, not for the sake of the battle, but for the opportunity it

gave of representing horses in violent or dramatic action”.506 Where

previously the glamour of the soldiers’ uniforms had provided the

focal point of battle art, dramatic action was taking over. Nor would

the rare opportunity of showing the enemy at a disadvantage have

adversely affected the painting’s reception.507

While there was no dearth of popular images of the war in 1900, this

was not the case at the Royal Academy, causing the Graphic to ask

its readers [c]an it be that in these practical days, when the scarlet tunic has given way to the khaki jacket that there is not sufficient colour in warfare to make it pictorially attractive. Has the pride, pomp and circumstance of warfare vanished forever?508

The critic of the Illustrated London News was equally forthright,

commenting, possibly with relief, on “the unpaintableness of khaki”,

which had no doubt spared or deprived us, as the case maybe, of many a harrowing scene and many a hero’s homecoming. A colour which is chosen to be a disguise to man and make him insignificant is naturally not one which finds its praise in the studios.509

505 Greenwall, 1992: 55. In Just Like Bobs, NAM: 1987-11-89, Woodville includes a mounted soldier with an exotic turban in attendance. 506 The Athenaeum, 26 May 1900, quoted in Hichberger, 1988: 117; Spielmann, 1901: 423. 507 Jules George, when working with the troops in Helmand Province Afghanistan in 2010, effectively meets the challenge of representing khaki against sand by outlining his figures in darker brown by way of contrast. 508 Harrington, 1993: 276-77. 509 ILN, 17 May 1902.

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Although the Illustrated London News did concede that the war had

“at least” introduced “khaki” for “pictorial treatment”, there was

little to praise, reflecting instead that the “greatest strength and

freshest ideas” as the war drew to a close were to be found in the

sculpture gallery, whilst those war paintings which did appear,

largely avoided conflict.510

It was believed that the “spectacle of military glory showed men at

their masculine best” and although this was no longer an option on

the field, it was still possible to portray officers at least, in the more

romantic and dashing colours of their dress uniform notwithstanding

their workaday khaki.511 As late as 1930 Vita Sackville-West was

writing of her heroine that “[s]he regretted only that the men were in

ordinary evening dress; somehow she had imagined that they would

all be in uniform”.512 Thus Bacon was able to include the traditional

dress scarlet in his celebratory painting, Lord Roberts and his Chief

of Staff Lord Kitchener March from Bloemfontein to Pretoria, May

to June 1900 (1901) (location unknown) at a time when it was

believed Roberts had brought the war to an end. In doing so, Bacon

was following in Sargent’s footsteps in his elegant portrait of

Colonel Ian Hamilton, CB, DSO (1898) (fig.55), admired for its

“masculine stage management and confident painterly style with

British military power and colonial self-confidence”.513 With his

dramatic pose, the critic of the Art Journal believed that Hamilton’s

portrait “might be labelled ‘Imperialism’”, noting especially “the hot

reds” that were “splashed upon the muscular jaw”.514 In 1902, a bust

portrait of Baden-Powell (Charterhouse School) by G.F.Watts (1817-

1904) was submitted to the Royal Academy “in the khaki for whose

unloveliness Mr Brodrick made excuse on the score of utility at the

Academy Banquet”, though the monotone was relieved by a long 510 ILN, 17 May, 1902. It is also the case that some of the artists were still at the war front, Harrington, 1993: 280. 511 Roy, 2012: 27. 512 Sackville-West, 1983: 182. 513 Stephenson, 2010: 221. 514 Art Journal, 1899: 187.

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green tie and wide brimmed felt hat with a touch of red.515 Gradually,

however, khaki took on its own mystique and glamour as officers in

particular began to revel in the different shades, fabric and cut of

their uniforms, Compton Mackenzie reporting how Colonel Benyon

spoke of setting out “first in my exquisite eau de nil uniform and

then in an even more exquisite uniform of café au lait”.516 If not quite

so picturesque, khaki was, nevertheless, becoming fashionable.

As the war progressed, disbelief in the army’s poor performance

turned to disillusionment and then indifference and with it, a move

away from a uniform khaki (uniform) to a resurgence in genre

paintings, such as The Soldier’s Return (1900) (fig.56) by Marcus

Stone (1840-1921), harking back to Paton’s earlier painting Home,

but in a highly romanticised style. Both soldier and girlfriend are

wearing eighteenth-century clothing which allowed Stone to abandon

khaki in favour of the traditional scarlet and tricorn hat, adding to the

idyllic garden setting where the girlfriend is sniffing sadly at a flower

before she catches sight of her love. Rather more realistic, though

anticipating what Cassandra Albinson has called “nostalgia even for

the recent past”, and again set within beautiful vegetation, John

Byam Shaw (1872-1919), followed this painting in 1901 with his

enigmatic and elegiac painting of a single woman dressed in black

against a lush green background and entitled simply The Boer War

(fig.57).517 From her attitude, the viewer is left to reconstruct her

story as the likely wife, fiancée or girlfriend, mourning her dead

husband or lover. Nothing is explicit and, as Tim Barringer has

explored, Byam Shaw is drawing on mid-Victorian representations,

such as Millais’ 1851-52 painting Ophelia (Tate Britain), to confront

515 Art Journal, 1902: 206. 516 Mackenzie, 1929: 129; I am grateful to Martin Watts, formerly of York Museums Trust for drawing this to my attention. 517 Albinson, 2013: 79. The painting was accompanied by Christina Rossetti’s haunting words: “Last Summer green things were greener/Brambles fewer, the skies bluer”; see Trumble and Rager, 2013: 373; Mackenzie refers to Shaw’s painting as using female suffering to highlight imperial insecurity, Mackenzie, 2001: 333.

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and resolve contemporary problems.518 In his careful representation

of an English landscape, Byam Shaw conversely references the dust

of the Veldt; in his solitary woman, where the unspoken element is

the absent soldier, a member of the imperial troops, fighting to

preserve all that is comforting back home, whilst simultaneously

reflecting a growing public unease as the war progressed.519

Photography

No pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.520

While war artists were struggling with the purpose of their art and

modes of representation, photography posed yet another challenge

with its potential in the popular art market at least, as it was believed

that here was a way in which to record a scene with authenticity and

in all its stark reality. By 1862, for example, cameras were recording

“piles of bodies” after the particularly bloody Battle of Antietam

(Library of Congress) in the American Civil War (1861-65).521 In the

face of such brutal images, words were scarcely necessary to bring

home the ghastly “Harvest of Battle”, and in its death-like rendition,

paradoxically “photography could keep the dead around forever”.522

Death had become a raw spectacle in the theatre of war, displayed

without regard to the sensitivities of the living. As Mathew Brady

dourly commented “[d]ead men don’t move”, and consequently

provided rich material for the still shot.523 Strangely, the instant a

photograph had been taken carried with it a peculiar death-like

quality, an “image-memory” as if the scene had been crystallised,

mummified, in what Stephen Cheeke has referred to as the

518 Barringer, 2001: 66. 519 Barringer, 2001: 80; Byam Shaw was praised for his “noteworthy picture” by Frank Rinder in Art Journal, 1901: 182. 520 Gibbs, 1920: 387. 521 Goldberg, 1991: 25. These photographs were taken by Alexander Gardner under the direction of Matthew Brady. 522 Goldberg, 1991: 10; Faust, 2008: xvi. Harvest of Battle refers to the title given by Timothy O’Sullivan to one of his more famous photographs (Getty Museum) and is used by Nevinson for his 1919 painting of the First World War. 523 Faust, 2008: 110 draws attention to the importance of preserving the identities of the dead and according their bodies due respect.

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“deathwards pull of the image”.524 Neither did the dead respond, but

instead invited a closer inspection, “introducing shame into the act of

looking” in a manner to match Butler’s traumatised central figure in

Balaclava.525 What had started out as documentation, was

developing into a kind of exciting, if forbidden, voyeurism.

Moreover, as Sean Willcock has observed, the camera, like the

brush, “was no innocent instrument in the imperial imaginary”, but

had the potential to be an active participant in the Empire’s

propaganda machinery.526

It is also more than a little coincidental that the terminology of this

developing art was military in origin, as in camera “shots” taken

when the “trigger” is pulled, and film “cuts”. Cameras, the new

weapons of war, are pointed at subjects in the same manner as guns,

as for instance in Woodville’s All That Was Left of Them (fig.33),

“capturing” their images, and, especially in the early days with their

long telescopic lenses, bore a striking and unnerving resemblance to

the barrel of a gun. With its technological equipment, photography

was not only able to reflect horror, but to emulate it.

In fact, there were no professional British war photographers in the

Boer War to rival Brady or Fenton, though Harold Nicholls and

Reinholt Thiele (1856-1921) were active. In particular Thiele, a

German photographer living in London, produced some creditable

shots for the Graphic, photographing both President Kruger and Lord

Roberts, while the American Underwood brothers employed door-to-

door salesman offering collections of war photographs for sale.527

Photographic development was in a state of transition between the

wet collodion plates used by Fenton and a slower dry negative

524Albinson, 2013: 77; Cheeke, 2008: 145; see also Sontag, 1971: 154, who refers to a photograph as a “trace”. 525 Nead, 2011:308; International Human Rights laws now prohibit photographic representation of the faces of the dead; Favret, 2010: 194. 526 Willcock, 2013: 113 and see also the section The Combative Camera in full, 2013: 104-14. 527 Lewinski, 1978: 56; Thompson, 2002: 103.

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process, as yet unmastered, and although cameras were very much in

evidence, many of the photographic reproductions in newspapers

were of poor quality, said by the Sphere to be “tiresome to the eye

and repugnant to the artistic scene”.528 As with painters and

illustrators, there was the ongoing problem of the invisibility of the

Boers, coupled with an inability to take live action shots, owing to

the lengthy exposures required. Photographs, in spite of Nevinson’s

later pronouncement to the contrary, were static, capturing a single

instant, the composition of which in war the photographer had little

power to arrange.529 The dusty sand, too, was a problem as Dickson

records in his journal “[w]e have made every effort to get a

photograph of the Boer position, and the effect of the shots, by

means of the telephoto, but we were forced to give it up owing to the

haze which made it impossible to focus properly”.530 Transport of

heavy photographic equipment was difficult and was also affected by

the environment, the inevitable sandy dust clogging the camera

mechanism.531 Mud was even worse when it came to developing the

films as the necessary water had to stand for hours to allow mud to

settle at the bottom before use and, even so, the final effect was

sandpapery.532

Blood could not be shown in all its goriness as photography was then

confined to black and white reproductions, neatly circumventing the

artistic challenge of khaki whilst providing no advantage over

drawings for the press. More strikingly, as Jorge Lewinski

comments, Boer War photography did not convey the totality of the

war experience by showing human suffering as in America and

although photography in general was becoming socially aware, this

did not seem to be the case in South Africa.533 Like the war artists,

528 Lewinski, 1978: 57; Sphere cited in Harrington, 1993: 275. 529 Galassi, 1981: 17. 530 Dickson, 1995: 75. 531 Hodgson, 1974: 22. 532 Hodgson, 1974: 146; this was especially true of photographs taken at the crossing of the Modder River. 533 Lewinski, 1978: 55.

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professional British photographers avoided the more unpalatable

facts of the war and although Dickson did record the aftermath of

disasters such as Spion Kop, he chose to do so from Red Cross

stations, not from the site of the engagement. In particular, there are

no professional British camera shots, for example, recording dead

bodies, the starvation endured by the black population in siege

towns, farm burnings as recorded by Woodville or the barbed wire

and concentration camps erected by Kitchener in the latter part of the

war.534 As Gervais has established in his analysis of representations

of the Crimean and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 in the press,

there was “a certain resistance to the new medium of photography,”

in part owing to the initial need for an engraver to prepare the result

for publication.535 Whatever the reason, these subjects were left to

photographers from elsewhere and to the amateurs on the spot,

raising questions as to the ownership and dissemination of national

(and international) history.536

An album “of upwards of Three Hundred Photographic Engravings”

published exclusively in Cape Town in 1901 of Boer, British and

Colonial forces, was produced to redress inaccurate and imaginative

representations of the conflict which “though well and ingeniously

drawn” were said not to be truthful.537 Although it, too, avoided the

sensitive issue of British atrocities, like Simpson in the Crimea, it did

go some way to highlight the difficulties encountered by the British

soldiers and how poorly they were served by their equipment and

preparatory instructions. A photograph of guns landed from British

warships came with the caption that “it became very evident that the

Boers were provided with superior guns to those used by the British

troops” in the early part of the war, while another, showing a group

of educated and armed Boers, gave the lie to their ignorant “back-

534 Lewinski, 1978: 55-56. 535 Gervais, 2010: 371. 536 Coombs, 2003: 66. 537 The Anglo-Boer War, 1901: u/p [-3].

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veldt” qualifications.538 Groups of Boers are shown riding the novel

“War Cycle”, an ingenious method of scouting, dispatch riding and

ambulance work on a series of linked bicycles along the railway

tracks, highlighting their superior communications.539 Others are

seen firing from a trench, which could extend “upwards of sixteen

miles” and, protected as they were with barbed wire, years ahead of

the First World War, evidence the difficulties the British faced in this

new type of guerilla warfare.540 Photographs of Spion Kop and the

deserted battle-ground of Magersfontein where nearly nine hundred

British troops were killed, leave the viewer in no doubt as to the

devastation faced by the troops.541

As Lee has observed, the Boer War was unique in that it was the

only time that British soldiers were officially allowed to take

cameras to the warfront.542 By their very personal nature, it is

difficult to assess how many of their photographs survived.

However, it is clear from Lee’s own substantial collection, much of it

from the albums of troops from all ranks, that there were some very

enthusiastic amateur photographers, whose “amazingly vivid”

“snaps” bear the authenticity of the moment, much as the sketches of

soldiers previously reproduced by printsellers and the press.543 They

harness the energy and genuine curiosity of a war tourist

unencumbered by the need to produce official images of “our brave

fighting force”.544 Sadly, there is no attribution, or provenance for

these albums, although one album seems to be the work of a member

of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Fusiliers.545 What is striking is that

these photographs are generally not posed and the content

unrestricted. Accordingly, there are images of dead soldiers, civilians 538 The Anglo-Boer War, 1901: 4, 17. The caption confirms that “many of them are educated and in easy circumstances.” 539 The Anglo-Boer War, 1901: 33. 540 The Anglo-Boer War, 1901: 124, 98. 541 The Anglo-Boer War, 1901: 179, 98. 542 NMM, Emmanuel Lee Collection, 2012-5040, though this is not to say that troops in the First World War did not ignore this prohibition against cameras. 543 NMM, Emmanuel Lee Collection, 2012-5040. 544 NMM, Emmanuel Lee Collection, 2012-5040. 545 This regiment is likely to consist of volunteers.

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and animals, observation balloons, Boer prisoners, farm burnings,

prison camps and emaciated children, not seen elsewhere.546

Interestingly, some are shots of what are termed “fake battles” but

with no explanation as to how or why they came to be taken or what

they represented.547 Others provide powerful evidence of the

topography of the region, one photograph in particular bearing a

remarkable resemblance to the scene painted by Giles in Race for the

Kopje, and it will be remembered that Giles had himself served in the

desert. Many have deteriorated over time and are both faded and

curled at the edges, while, unfortunately, only some bear a date or a

caption identifying their subject-matter.

Nevertheless, such photographs as were taken benefited enormously

from the strong clear light of the South African Veldt, much as

Butler’s Boer War paintings of the barren landscape, and were

originally of excellent quality. This was true not only of the

professionals, but also the many illustrators, war artists and amateur

photographers amongst the troops who captured scenes of greater

drama in their photographs, through the extremes of light and shade.

As the war artist, George, found in similar circumstances in

Afghanistan in 2010, “the inevitable haze of dust” in the heat gave “a

particular clarity of light that was rich and powerful”.548 Even now,

strong shadows can be seen in their images in spite of the ageing

process. Whilst professional photography was generally unable to

outdo painting by recording action, it was able to convey at least

equally vivid scenes of camp-life and on the march, take portraits

and was a critical element in the social discourse of the war,

notwithstanding that many of the images reproduced in the illustrated

press, were either touched up or painted over in the light of earlier

criticisms of their poor reproductive quality.549 Amateur photography

went that one step further by highlighting issues not generally seen in 546 Many are now reproduced for the first time in Lee’s book To the Bitter End. 547 The wording “fake battles” is taken from a caption. 548 George, 2011: 9. 549 Hodgson, 1974: 26. By this time, engraving was no longer necessary.

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the illustrated press and provides a valuable record of a soldier’s life

and duties in South Africa. How far they were actively suppressed by

Kitchener’s effective censorship is a matter for conjecture. It is

certain that the professionals, at least, were not universally popular as

Dickson reports, referring in particular to the “virulent” opposition of

an unnamed army officer who did everything he could to obstruct

him.550

Especially evocative and shocking among the published photographs

were those taken by an unknown Boer (significantly not British)

soldier, of the British dead at Spion Kop in 1900 (fig.58) and which

were flashed around the world. These were taken some ten days after

the event, showing the still unburied corpses, exposed as they fell in

the deep mountainous and grave-like trench, split open to display the

bodies, cascading like a waterfall down the slope, curving touchingly

around each other as they lay.551 The very matter of fact way in

which they were recorded, reverberated with an awesome attraction,

revealing the “blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its

pageantry” and in opposition to the carefully crafted reconstructions

by some British war artists depicting courage in adversity.552 In

confirmation of the horror, Private Fred Evans related his experience

at Spion Kop of “simply walking up the hill to be murdered [. . .]

fellows’ arms and legs being blown off, some having their brains

blown out and their blood splashing all over you”.553 Along with

photographs of the surrender of British troops, these images provided

magnificent propaganda for the Boers both at home and abroad as a

new weapon of war and were shamefully reinforced by their

photographs of Belsen-like starvation in the British run concentration

550 Dickson, 1995: 64; this mirrors the poor reception afforded William Russell in the Crimean War. 551 Lee, 1985: 100. 552 Sontag, 2003: 47, citing Alexander Gardner, photographer in the American Civil War; see also Searle, 2004: 279. 553 Caption at the National Army Museum, seen 11 April 2013; I have not traced any equivalent British photographs of the devastation at Spion Kop, though there is a far less dramatic drawing of Boers tending the British wounded with water and rifling the pockets of the dead by J. Greig, reproduced in Wilson, 1900: 305.

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camps (fig.59).554 The brutality of these camps was being matched

by the tyranny of the Boer camera and proved to be a strong counter-

image to that promoted by British war artists. In 1899, Gustave

Moynier had written, somewhat prematurely, but with more than a

little justification, that “[w]e now know what happens every day

throughout the whole world [. . .] the descriptions given by daily

journalists put, as it were, those in agony on fields of battle under the

eyes of [newspaper] readers”.555 He might well have added to this

comment, the “shots” of the cameramen.

In spite of the appalling, and intrusive, accuracy of which

photography was capable, not everyone was convinced of its

potential. Questions were raised as to both the camera’s perspective

and degree of truth, Edward Hopper remarking that “the photo was

always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it

up”.556 It was believed that photography was attempting to usurp

painting’s representational qualities, and as early as the 1860s the

painter and art historian, Eugène Fromentin had accused the camera

of a want of imagination, leading to degeneration in painting by

example.557 George Clausen (1852-1944), writing nearly fifty years

later, referred to the invention of photography as having “a

disturbing influence on our art”, and one which “seems destined to

take the place of the picture with a story”.558 War artists themselves

appreciated the challenge photography posed, though some saw it as

part of a natural and complementary artistic progression, the critic

Kenneth McConkey confirming that photography was an aid to art as

it “underscored the primacy of vision”, while Wollen wrote in the

Friend that [T]he camera and the pencil can, and will, live together during a campaign, but I venture to doubt if the camera will be able to do all that its champion claims for it, and the war artist who knows his

554 The Brunt of War quoted by Lee, 1985: 181. 555 Cited in Sontag, 2003: 16. 556 Galassi, 1981: 18. 557 Galassi, 1981: 12; Callen, 1990: 28. 558 Clausen, 1913: 4, 325.

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business, which cannot be learned in a single campaign, will come out on top. For reproducing and putting before the public scenes representing the strife and clamour of war, with its accompanying noise and confusion, the man with the Kodak cannot compete for one single moment with the individual who is using the pencil.559

As early as 1866, the Art Journal had been warning of the possibility

that the “camera may, ere long, be found superseding the burin of

the engraver” although on balance it felt that the market for the

engraving and the photograph would not merge.560 Photography, the

writer believed, would be reserved for those who were unable to

afford the higher prices and better quality of the engraving. Writing

about Charlton in the Artist, Fred Miller felt that the “work of the

camera has stood in the way of artists, because it has held out false

hopes and made men lean on what is after all a broken reed by

trusting to the camera instead of to their own observation”, while

Clausen observed that “[t]he minutely searching lens of the camera

presents everything with indisputable accuracy, only not as we see

it” (my italics) and discarded its use as an aid to painting.561 Already

in the Crimean War and Indian Uprising there had been doubts as to

the authenticity of all the photographs taken by Fenton and Beato,

and in particular their respective shots of the Valley of the Shadow of

Death in 1855 and Interior of Secundra Bagh, Lucknow, after the

Slaughter of Two Thousand Rebels by the 93rd (Highlanders)

Regiment of Foot (National Army Museum) in 1858, where the

scenes had been artificially constructed.562 Dickson was not to be

outdone and the fact that he arrived in Pretoria too late for the

ceremonial raising of the flag did not prevent him filming a re-run,

559 McConkey, 2006: 23; Ralph, 1900: 379-80, quoting a letter entitled The War Artist of Today which is undated but probably written in 1900 or 1901. Interestingly all “Specials” are said to have had a camera, Harrington, 1993: 275. 560 Quoted in Haskins, 2012: 52; Ruskin agreed, viewing it as a mechanical device and bereft of the morality of labour, a “Phoebus of Magnesium wire”. Haskins, 2012: 57. 561 Miller, 1899: 66; Clausen, 1913: 44. 562 NAM: 1962-11-63-7.

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without the crowds and without Lord Roberts, focussing on the flag

to the exclusion of the recently vacated square beneath.563

Although hopes were high for photographic opportunities during the

war, by the time peace was declared, British war photography was

still in a state of transition, moving only gradually from

documentation to artistic representation and leaving behind less of a

record than might have been expected. Photography was still

considered ephemeral, “a disposable art”, the results fading with time

in a manner which, unlike the painter’s canvas, did not recommend it

to posterity.564 This was in part owing to the technical difficulties

experienced in the processing and it has, with some justification,

been argued that it was the amateur and semi-professionals who

seemed to achieve greater effect than the more experienced

professional photographer.565 The topical stereoscopic photographs

of Underwood and Underwood which were popular and of the instant

were sold in the same way as holiday postcards, and often similarly

discarded.566 Some pictures taken by the troops were also subject to

the censor and films were exposed before they could reach Britain;

others suffered from polluted water in the development process.

The war in South Africa had presented many differing challenges to

the battle artist. Several were under pressure to provide topical

images, others to show Boers behaving badly and the British troops

well in a campaign where the enemy was rarely sighted; Butler was

hampered by the public disapprobation of her husband’s principled

stance. All had to contend with the so-called “unpaintableness of

khaki” and the widespread use of photography. Nevertheless, I argue

that these late-Victorian war artists, some as a result of their

563 Dickson, 1995: iv. 564 Hodgson, 1974: 13. 565 Lewinski, 1978: 57. This could also be accounted for by the lack of restrictions placed on the amateur who was taking photographs for his own pleasure and record. 566 A collection of these can be viewed at NMM in the Emmanuel Lee Collection, 2012-. 5040 (uncatalogued); see also Hodgson, 1974: 154.

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cooperation with the “Specials”, were able to offer the public a

particular view of the conflict through both their popular and

academic representations. By their reliance on black and white

drawings for the press and increasingly dynamic or monumental

approaches to their academic works, I contend that they developed

their own methods of circumventing the less glamorous elements of

the new uniform, and methods which allowed them to differentiate

between the khaki of the soldier at war as against the magnificence

of the ornamental dress uniform. Although there was an increase in

the use of photography for recording events, this in turn was

hampered by cumbersome technology when taking photographs and

reproducing them for publication, along with doubts as to the

authenticity of these images. The absence of colour combined with

the static quality of photographs palled in comparison to the dramatic

and dynamic representations of the artists both on and off the field,

who sought to present a new visual language compensating for the

constraints of a guerrilla campaign. Woodville, for example, in the

angle chosen for his painting All That Was left of Them showed an

almost photographic awareness of the way in which he could raise

the stature of the men by his upward profiling of them against the

sky, a technique not employed by photographers themselves at that

period. Questions had also been raised as to the durability of the

photograph, many of which faded over time and were largely

regarded as disposable. In the face of their continuing emphasis on

the individual, non-aristocratic, soldier, however, what these battle

artists failed to represent were the more disturbing, critical aspects of

the war, the brutal deaths within the imperial army and, with the sole

exception of Woodville’s image of farm burning, the atrocities

committed against the Boers. Although in this they differed from

Butler’s Crimean paintings with her emphasis on suffering, it is

unfair to equate the two situations as emotions were still raw as the

Boer War drew to a close while Butler was painting her Crimean

scenes some twenty years after the event, during which memories

had been allowed to mellow and harsh facts, absorbed. The onset of

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the First World War a mere decade after the end of the Boer War

provided new material for the battle artist rendering a visual re-

assessment of the events in South Africa obsolete, a decade which

itself was one of transition and re-adjustment, not least within the

genre of battle painting.

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CHAPTER FOUR

EXHIBITING WAR; EXHIBITING HISTORY

The Empire went to war in 1899 for a concept that was finished, for a cause that was lost, for a grand illusion.567

“That wretched war”, the conflict coming at the very end of the

nineteenth century in South Africa, had proved devastating for the

British.568 Not only had the Boers taught them “a lesson”, but the

nation struggled over the number of male volunteers unfit for

service.569 Nearly 450,000 imperial troops had been required to

contain fewer than 90,000 Boer farmers at a cost of more than £200

million to the Treasury.570 Britain, it was said, was “not only a bully,

but an inefficient one at that”.571 This, alongside a growing global

awareness of the increasing naval power and militarism of other

countries, specifically Germany, the United States and Japan, had led

to a widespread feeling of, at the very least uncertainty, and at most,

extreme anxiety.572 The prospect of a European war was not far from

the thoughts of many politicians and army personnel, who had

already started to consider how best this might be avoided, or if

necessary, fought.573 While statesmen speedily negotiated alliances,

the military looked anxiously to their resources. To enthusiastic

audiences, Lord Roberts lectured at public schools, urging

preparation for war, declaring that “if we do not take the trouble to

be prepared we shall not only deserve defeat, but most certainly

567 Robinson and Gallagher, 1961: 461. 568 Pakenham, 1992: 576. 569 This refers to The Lesson, a poem by Kipling published in 1903, commenting on the war, which starts “We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.” The statistics on unfitness in Manchester were even worse than in the country as a whole, Searle, 2004: 305; see also Seebohm Rowntree’s work on Poverty published in London in 1901. 570 Pakenham, 1992: 572. 571 Thornton, 1959: 113. 572 Britain was not alone in this as evidenced by Margaret MacMillan’s comment that it is “striking just how many fears rippled through European society in the period before 1914”. MacMillan, 2014: 240. 573 For example, Baden-Powell who chose the boy scouts’ motto Be Prepared with impending war in mind, Girouard, 1981: 282; see also Friedberg, 1988: 135-36 and Searle, 2004: 244-48 on the mood of the period; Brockington, 2009: 9-10 who refers to “the fascination of art and literature which seemed to prophesy war” during this period, among others.

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suffer it”.574 By 1905 he was warning that he “had no hesitation in

stating that our armed forces, as a body, are as absolutely unfitted

and unprepared for war as they were in 1899-1900”.575 In 1903, this

anxiety had been expressed through the publication of The Riddle of

the Sands by Erskine Childers, himself recently returned from the

Boer War, in which a German plot against Britain was revealed in

true adventure style, followed in 1913 by When William Came by

Saki, dealing with life after conquest by Germany.576 In the wake of

widespread international condemnation of its actions, Britain was

feeling isolated, just as it was beginning to sense its new position on

the world stage.577 King Edward VII, a well-known Francophile, was

prevented by Gallic hostility from travelling to Paris until 1903, and

even then initially received a decidedly cool welcome.578 Business

entrepreneurs soon followed, reaching across the channel to

encourage commercial exchange and cooperation, notably in the

London Olympics and the Franco-British exhibition of 1908, which,

as Annie Coombs has shown, cemented the Entente Cordiale of

574 Cited in Girouard, 1981: 282 quoting from Lord Robert’s speech at Clifton College as reported in O.F. Christie Clifton College. 575 Cited in Hynes, 1968: 40; the Elgin Commission took a different view, believing that Britain did have sufficient capacity even in emergency, Thompson, 2002: 202. Mark Sykes returned from the Boer War with the determination to strengthen army transport infrastructure, leading to a reserve of waggoners ready to depart for France in August 1914. See in particular his correspondence with his mother in which he accuses the Government and the War Office of murdering “the Militia by stupid, brutal indifference, asinine stupidity and colossal folly” in their lack of preparations for the war in South Africa. BTH, ref: DDST, 1,2,1,29. Conversely, Sir Arthur Nicolson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, expressed the view that he had never seen such a calm international situation, a view he repeated even after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, Bostridge, 2014: 116, 168. 576 The Daily Mail also serialised William Le Queux’s book The Invasion of 1910 (1906). 577 The plot of Saki’s novel centres on the successful invasion and occupation of Britain by Germany. Not all politicians agreed with the need to build up military resources as is evidenced by Lloyd George’s view as late as 1914 that Winston Churchill was too warlike in his desire to build another four Dreadnoughts, Bostridge, 2014: 33-35. 578 Priestley, 1970: 36-44; King Edward is largely regarded as having healed the breach between France and Britain during the period leading up to the Entente Cordiale, a Franco-British alliance in 1904, though even he had refused to attend the Paris Exposition of 1900 following insults from the French media, MacMillan, 2014: 23.

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1904, just as it reinforced a sense of, and obsession with,

nationhood.579

International exhibitions played a significant role in this process with

artists working to encourage cooperation, fostering cultural relations

with fellow artists from France, Germany, Belgium, Holland and

Italy, exemplifying the mutually beneficial relationship between

nationalism and internationalism, and “in response to the seemingly

endless preoccupation of the great powers with military

strengthening”.580 In 1904 Hugh Lane organised the first ever

exhibition of Irish contemporary art at the Guildhall, London,

showcasing work of a distinctly nationalist flavour as the country

moved towards independence.581 Two years later, there were no

fewer than three exhibitions of German art held in London. Frank

Rinder, writing in the Art Journal, commented that art had “always

reached out beyond mere territorial boundaries” and noting that one

of these exhibitions, featuring German contemporary works and held

at the Prince’s Gallery, Knightsbridge, was specifically expressed to

be “in token of gratitude and good fellowship”.582 Likewise, German

classical music and opera enjoyed an upsurge of popularity in

London.583 Britain was moving fast to heal wounds and to shore up

defences.

The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, in the midst of the Boer War,

brought with it a kaleidoscope of mixed emotions, both mourning the

old regime and welcoming the new. In its most simplistic

formulation this initially led to two opposing views, either that the

new monarchy heralded a major turning point in British social and

cultural life, or that it was no more than a transitional period between

579 Coombs, 1987: 153. See also Brockington, 2009: 4 who comments that “the ideology of internationalism [. . .] went hand in hand with the rise of nationalism in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.” 580 Akira Iriye cited in Brockington, 2009: 10. 581 www.hughlane.le accessed 26 February 2014. 582 Art Journal, July, 1906: 218-20; see also Brockington, 2009: 301-309. 583 Bostridge, 2014: 124-25, 136.

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late-Victorian traditionalism and 1920s modernism with no particular

character of its own.584 In 1917 H.G.Wells likened Victoria’s death

to the lifting of “some compact and dignified paperweight [. . .] from

people’s ideas [. . .] as if at once they had begun to blow about

anyhow,” bringing to an end “an epoch of tremendous stabilities”,

while her successor was seen as merely a caretaker monarch in the

period leading up to the First World War.585 In fact, as recent

scholarship has shown, a complex and interconnected tapestry of

conflicting values and positions began to emerge.586 This was a

period of “deeply productive conflicts” – a multitude of oppositions

including continuity and change, stasis and speed, modernity and

modernism, degeneration and regeneration, nationalism and

imperialism, fin-de-siècle traditionalism and the avant-garde, anxiety

and optimism and opulence and poverty – each with its own

narrative. All these contrasting elements jostled together in a socially

discordant and disjunctive interplay, while at the same time often

embodying a real sense of being Edwardian; a pervasive and “self-

conscious awareness of living in a moment of transition”.587 This

was further complicated by the failure of these oppositions to sit

neatly within the period between the end of the nineteenth century

and the outbreak of World War One. As Amy Cruse has suggested,

with the accession of Edward, “there was a general quickening of the

pace, a feeling of expectancy, a gay confidence in the future”, while

in his Royal Academy lectures of 1904, Clausen, then President,

584 Stephenson, 2013: 1. For recent analyses and perspectives on this period see O’Neill and Hatt, The Edwardian Sense and Trumble and Wolk Rager, Edwardian Opulence. 585 H.G.Wells in The Soul of a Bishop, [1st ed. 1917], (London, 1933): 23. 586 As early as 1968, Samuel Hynes was describing the Edwardian period as having “a consciousness of its own separateness from what went before and what followed”, Hynes, 1972: 1; see also Nead, 2010: 111-12. 587 This quotation is from Fletcher, 2013b: 99; see also Light, 1988: 153-57; Beckett and Cherry, 1987; Stevens, 1988; O’Neill and Hatt, 2010; Trumbull and Wolk Rager, 2013; Fletcher, 2013a and Visual Culture in Britain, 2013, issue 14 generally for a discussion of this period; see also Kipling’s view, cited in Nead, that the newly mechanised transport allowed one seamlessly to “slide from one century to another”, nicely encapsulating the fluid quality of the Edwardian period, reaching back to the past and forward to the future, Nead, 2010: 105.

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advised students that “we live in times when everything is in the

melting-pot”.588

It was within this confusing maelstrom that the late-Victorian war

artists continued to exhibit. Those artists who had been painting in

the 1890s did not suddenly cease to do so in 1901, but continued well

into the twentieth century, posing the question as to whether it was –

and is – possible to identify anything distinctive about their work in

the Edwardian period. What did it mean to be a battle artist at the

intersection of these two centuries, and in particular how was their

art to act as signifier for the shifting experiences and increasingly

mechanised preoccupations of the time, especially in the light of the

late war’s unpopularity? Moving into the twentieth century, these

late-Victorian war artists have been – and are still – spectacularly

overlooked in discussions of modernity and modernism, and their

work and reputations have largely been allowed to pass unremarked

into the by-waters of art history and public recognition. In this

chapter I open up for closer inspection the work of this neglected

cohort during this period and examine how far it can be said they

contributed to the repositioning of British war art and its imagery

leading up to and into the First World War. What was their impact at

the dawn of the twentieth century; a century shortly to be dominated

by a European war, not in the distant Empire, but on their doorstep?

A Challenging Transition

During the opening stages of the Boer War, illustrations in the press

from the “Specials” at the front had been devoured by a public

anxious for news, but this early momentum had been difficult to

sustain as the war dragged on dismally without resolution. There was

nothing heroic about block-houses, concentration camps and farm

burnings. As Krebs has asserted, the atrocities of the war had

588 Cruse, 1938: 205; Clausen, 1913: 7.

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“eroded the myth of imperial chivalry”, and in particular the code of

the “chivalric soldier”.589 Furthermore, the intrepid, imperialistic and

“manly” approach, both in style and content, adopted by many Boer

War artists was problematic; the promised adventure story had not

delivered concrete results and success was qualified. Already, as

exemplified by Stone’s The Return of the Soldier in 1902, artists

were turning away from representations of war itself to more

tangential portrayals of military incidents, portraits or genre

paintings from an earlier age, for want of suitable contemporary

material and were eschewing conflict.590 As Spielmann, writing in

Cassell’s Magazine in 1901, observed, “[r]ealistic battle-pictures are

not acceptable to the ordinary gallery visitor. Unmitigated accuracy

in horror painting is repellent to our people”.591 Simultaneously, in

architecture, a new “taste for order, symmetry and grandeur”

developed as a result of a conspicuous “mood of defensive, even

paranoid imperialism and exaggerated patriotism”.592 By way of

diversion from conflict, pageantry, film shows, exhibitions and

department stores came to form a major part of mass entertainment,

and entertainment where the crowd itself became part of the

spectacle in an Edwardian version of the earlier panoramas and

flâneurs of Vauxhall Gardens. Here though, the panoramas that had

previously displayed contemporary battles and sieges, as for example

the Siege of Sebastopol, were replaced by episodes from Roman

history and Shakespearean plays alongside contemporary fantasies

such as Peter Pan.593 This was a period when the Edwardians were,

in Morna O’Neill’s words, “nostalgic for their own moment”,

reinventing themselves as modern day classicists, just as the ground

beneath was shifting and they were confronted by many and diverse

589 Krebs cited in Nasson, 2002: 816. 590 Spalding, 1986: 15; Fox makes a similar observation in relation to art towards the end of the First World War with an increasing emphasis on the pastoral, Fox, 2009: 135. 591 Spielmann, 1901: 421. 592 Stamp, 2007: 56; see also Clive Bell where he condemns excessive and unnecessary detail, Bell, 1913: 117. 593 Ryan, 2010: 45.

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political, social, economic and cultural transformations.594 The

burning question for war artists at this juncture was what and how

should they be painting. Was there indeed a future for their art?

Against a background of the various artistic movements of the time, I

follow Hichberger’s lead in noting the influence of the artistic

formulae initiated or promoted by Butler in British battle painting of

the “charge”, the “last stand”, the “procession” or “march past” and

the psychological effects of conflict, before going on to consider

whether and, if so, how these images were variously adopted by her

contemporaries.595 How far, for example, did such formulae

contribute to artistic representation into the First World War, at a

time when photography was strictly regulated at the Front and before

official photographers and artists were appointed?596 I explore the

interface between the portrayals by these artists of military incidents

from a previous age and the works of those Edwardian artists who

turned to history painting, using military and chivalric spectacle to

highlight contemporary concerns. Was it indeed still possible to view

military pictures as forming part of the tradition of history painting?

How far did their art continue to portray soldiers as heroic sportsmen

on the field of battle, displaying all the sangfroid of Woodville’s

battling troops as in All That Was Left of Them? or was this approach

simply a thing of the past? What had happened in Britain, socially,

politically, culturally and economically to bring about such a

perceived change in military art and its audience between 1902 and

World War One?

Notwithstanding their current neglect, it has to be remembered that

these were artists who continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy,

594 O’Neill, 2010: 1, 9. 595 Hichberger, 1988: 77, 83, 91, who refers to innovation only and not promotion, although it is clear there that there were isolated examples of such formulae prior to Butler’s work. She also influenced her French counterparts as can be seen in the striking similarities between Butler’s Scotland Forever! (1881), and Detaille’s 1891 painting Vive L’Empereur! 596 Eksteins, cited in Saunders, 2004:11; Malvern, 2004: 38.

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and at other selected galleries, and who were still being given

prominent space in metropolitan exhibitions to show their paintings,

paintings which even into the First World War appealed to the values

of a large proportion of the public. Private galleries were keen to

exploit the commercial value of war art and, especially in the initial

stages of the conflict, were willing to support a very catholic mix of

such artworks.597 The Leicester Galleries, regarded as the pre-

eminent avant-garde art dealers during the war years, were content to

offer Butler solo exhibitions until at least 1917, while during the

same period offering space to Nevinson, Paul Nash and Kennington,

all members of the new generation of war artists.598 As Harrington,

who notably has not ignored the contribution of these late-Victorians,

has so cogently argued, their work needs to be considered in order to

come to some understanding of contemporary attitudes to war in

1914, and not subsumed by the new body of painters emerging

mainly from the Slade School of Art.599

James Fox, in his thesis on the eclecticism of art in Britain during the

First World War, criticises art historians for the “privileging of

modern over traditional, front line over home front and dissenting

truth over prevailing opinion”.600 He challenges their consequent

failure fully to explore and interpret many equally important

components of the art world beyond those works now generally

regarded as the genuinely artistic products of the war. Even so, he

does not touch on the Great War work of Butler and refers only

briefly to Woodville in his role as illustrator for the popular press.

Charlton, Crofts, Giles and Wollen do not merit a mention.601 The

597 Harries, 1983: 74. 598 Malvern, 2004: 37; Butler exhibited there in 1912 and 1917, Nevinson in 1916 and Nash and Kennington in 1918. Butler also exhibited in 1919 but not without some difficulty as discussed later. 599 Harrington, 1992: 46. 600 Fox, 2009: [u/p]: 1; this view is diametrically opposed to that expressed by Arnold Bennett in his work for the British War Memorials Committee (BWMC). 601 Stuart Sillars similarly writes of the “bewildering volume and variety of material” in his discussion of popular and fine arts during the war and yet he too refers only to Woodville’s work for the illustrated press. No other late-Victorian battle artists are mentioned, Sillars, 1987: 12, 73, 85. Morris briefly mentions

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failure of this “old guard” to remain in the public eye (and indeed,

that of art historians, including those who purport to be interested in

creating a non-modernist lineage) is, I argue, a consequence of the

ways in which their representation of warfare failed to be meaningful

to the British public in the face of a new, mechanistic warfare. As

Sue Malvern has observed, a “shift from the safe and derivative

work” of earlier artists “to the difficult and independent paintings of

Nash and Nevinson reflects changes in the nation’s needs for

differing visualisations of its experience of war”.602 Significantly,

Malvern is here comparing the work of Muirhead Bone (1876-1953)

to that of Nash and Nevinson and again does not address the

contribution of those late-Victorian war artists featured here.603

While this observation can be justified in part, it does not fully

represent the feeling of the wartime public, which continued to

admire works which took them away from the immediate horrors of

the war by making “a stirring appeal to the emotion and the

imagination”.604 Malvern herself acknowledges the public debate

over who was best placed to represent the truth of war and how, and

refers to the contrasting images produced by the Graphic as late as

1918 under the heading The Trench from Different Points of View:

The Battle of the War Artists, in which photographs are compared

with academic and modernist paintings.605 The accompanying

caption makes clear that the Graphic is not in sympathy with the

more modernist works, complaining that “[i]n consonance with the

policy of the Government doing everything, private enterprise in

describing the war has been abolished in favour of official Woodville, Wollen, Butler, Giles and Crofts (but not Charlton), attributing to them a “new nationalism” as seen in a “wave of heroic battle paintings showing British colonial triumphs in the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century”, but without any analysis or critical comment, Morris, 2005: 287. 602 Malvern, 1986: 488. 603 None of these artists rates a mention in Malvern’s influential work, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, though she does briefly discuss the work of J.P.Beadle, (1863-1947), whose illustrations for the Graphic, she remarks, “looked unpersuasive”. Malvern, 2004: 44, 37. 604 Fox, 2009: 134. 605 Malvern, 2004: 37-40. The academic painting is by Beadle and shows troops waiting to go over the top; the Official war artists are represented by Nash and Nevinson.

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supply”.606 It is clear from this that the debate was still live and

centred on the different modes of representing the common soldier,

the traditional artist taking care to represent him in mimetic detail

while the more avant-garde referenced the technological face of war,

and not always to public acclaim.

Exhibiting War

In 1915, nearly one year into the Great War, Butler’s paintings, After

[sic] Balaclava and “Steady the Drums and Fifes!” were shown at a

special exhibition of naval and military works at the Guildhall Art

Gallery in the heart of the City of London.607 The stated object of the

exhibition was “to recall to the public the heroic deeds of soldiers

and sailors in the past, and in the war which is now engaging the

forces of Europe”.608 It was curated by Alfred Temple, art director of

the Corporation of London, who provided short descriptive and

biographical notes, and benefited from loans of busts of King George

and Queen Mary (c.1915) alongside a portrait of Vice-Admiral

Nelson by Lemuel Abbott (1760-1802).609 The caption for Nelson

read “Thou famous Man/The greatest sailor since the world began”

and was accompanied by a short biography of his most notable

exploits.610 Amongst the naval paintings was a portrait by John

Lavery (1856-1941) of The Rt. Honourable Winston Churchill

(1915) (House of Commons), who “dealt ably with the Navy at a

critical moment” alongside a work entitled Trafalgar: The Death of

Nelson (1859-64) (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) by Daniel Maclise

(1806-70) and the patriotic Royal Academy exhibit, The Fleet of

606 Malvern, 2004: 38, citing the Graphic, 11 May 1918. 607 Harrington, 1992: 47-48. The original proposal for this exhibition came from the art gallery committee in Manchester where it was expected the exhibition would be staged. In the event it opened in London before transferring to Sheffield. 608 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: [u/p] 7. 609 Abbot’s date of birth is uncertain and could be 1761. As he painted many likenesses of Nelson, it has not been possible to identify which painting was exhibited. The busts of the king and queen were by Alfred Drury (1856-1944) and their current location is unknown. 610 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 11.

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England is her All-in-All (1910) (private collection) by

A.J.W.Burgess (1879-1957).611 The title of this last painting, taken

from the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, echoes the hopes and

fears of imperial Britain at war; hopes that the navy would remain

supreme regardless of Germany’s recent spate of ship building,

against fears that it might not.612 Goya’s The Duke of Wellington

(1812-14) (National Gallery) indicates the international flavour of

the exhibition with many Irish, American, Australian, Spanish and

French, but decidedly no German, artists, contributing to the military

paintings and sculptures.613 Care was taken to honour Britain’s

erstwhile enemy, France, in particular by praising its courage and

heroism even in adversity.614 Among the French artists, Detaille was

allocated space for thirteen exhibits, far in excess of the entries by

Butler, Woodville or Charlton, and chose to include the patriotic

Napoleon and his Generals (1898) (Musée de l’Armée, Paris),

recalling the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo ending the last

western European War in which Britain had been engaged.615 Other

French artists concentrated on portraying Germany in a bad light,

including Georges Rochegrosse (1859-1938) who painted To Arms!

Down with the Barbarians (location unknown) specifically for the

exhibition, while The Invasion of the Huns (1902) (Collection du

Musée du Vieux Château à Laval) by Octave Guillonet (1872-1967)

was accompanied by the words

[t]hese were the terrible Huns whose ferocity flamed forth against the Goths. In their invasion of Europe, all whom they met fell victim to their

611 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 20, 51, 21. The caption for Burgess’s 1910 painting, citing Sir Graham Berry, ran “who could estimate the loss involved in even a brief period of disaster to the Imperial Navy?” The fact that Burgess was Australian emphasises the imperial nature of Britain’s armed forces in the conflict. 612 Tennyson ends with the words “The fleet of England is her all-in-all/Her fleet is in your hands/And in her fleet her Fate.” 613 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 12. According to a recent biography, The Pike, the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio described Beethoven as “Flemish” during the First World War in order to continue to listen to his work, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, London, 2013: 408; Maclise’s painting The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher after the Battle of Waterloo is also exhibited, Temple, A.6.6 No 69: 51. 614 The most poignant example of this is J.L.Gerome’s Execution of Marshal Ney “one of the saddest episodes in history”, Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 128. 615 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 34, 61. Meissonier was represented by his painting Le Guide, an episode in the Napoleonic Wars, Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 58.

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uncivilised fury, and five distinct nations were swept away in that whirlwind of savagery

comparing the “Germanic horde which overran Belgium last August”

with the “multitudes who hurled themselves down the slopes of the

Alps into an astonished Italy”, and whose “ferocious spirit and lust

for destruction” were only differentiated on account of their changed

weaponry.616

There was no escaping this explicit reference to Germany’s invasion

of Belgium and France or the destruction of such cultural icons as the

cathedral in Rheims upon whose “exquisite work of architectural art

[. . .] the heavy guns of the Germans have been wantonly brought to

bear” and the library at Louvain the previous year.617 Even more

pointedly, F.H.Townsend’s famous 1914 Punch cartoon of Bravo

Belgium! may well have been influenced by the 1889 painting Un

Brave (Ile de France, Paris-Fiche Dépot), by Paul Emile Boutigny

(1853-1929) with the caption “A villager single-handed is keeping a

body of Germans at bay as they turn in at the far end of the street”.618

The cultural exchange with Germany of the first decade of the

twentieth century was giving way under the weight of nationalistic

propaganda and brutal conflict.

Other paintings and sculptures were selected from a wide cross-

section of battles up to and including the First World War, and did

not dwell exclusively on the Napoleonic Wars or barbarism.

Sargent’s portrait of Colonel Ian Hamilton, CB, DSO, was hung

alongside Field-Marshal Sir John French (1908) (photogravure,

National Portrait Gallery) by J. St Helier Lander (1868-1944) and

Hubert Herkomer’s Kitchener (1890) (National Portrait Gallery).

Victorian battle scenes were represented by The Thin Red Line-

Balaclava (1881) (John Dewar and Sons, Perth), The Battle of the 616 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 25-26. 617 Temple, A.6.6.No 69: 44. 618 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 24, 25, 27; Punch, 12 August 1914. This cartoon is also known as No Thoroughfare.

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Alma (1888) (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum) and The Storming

of the Dargai Heights (1897) (Guildhall Art Gallery) by Robert Gibb

(1845-1932), highlighting British heroic stoicism, alongside three

works from Desanges’ series of gallant Victoria Cross winners

(1863-80) (various venues).619 A group in bronze, The Defence or a

Call to Arms (1879) (Musée Rodin, Paris) was lent by the artist,

Auguste Rodin, (1840-1917) while New Sculpture was represented

by a bust of General Wolfe (1910) (Westerham, Kent) by Francis

Derwent Wood (1871-1926) referencing West’s 1770 image, and

Kiss of Victory (1878) (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) by Alfred

Gilbert (1854-1934), designed to inspire confidence in a swift and

successful outcome to the conflict.620 Focussing on more

contemporary incidents, Allen Stewart (1865-1951) portrayed The

Charge of the Scots Greys at St Quentin (1915) (private collection),

taking his inspiration from the retreat from Mons and his style from

Butler’s Scotland Forever!621 Butler’s own contribution, “Steady the

Drums and Fifes!” featured an incident from the Peninsula War in

1808. The caption, quoting Cardinal Manning, read [t]he highest courage in a soldier is said to be standing still under fire. It is the self-command of duty in obedience to authority. [. . .]. But to stand still under fire, still and motionless, is a supreme act of the will.622

Neither this painting, nor her second exhibit, Balaclava, was well

received. Although very different in attitude, the one showing the

aftermath and the other the precursor to battle, they were both said to

be “among the worst of her pictures”, and were criticised for their

“theatrical sentimentality”.623 Ironically, and in complete contrast to

the reviews she received in 1876 when Balaclava was said to exhibit

619 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 37, 40, 75, 76, 77. The VC winners shown included Lord Roberts, hero of the recent war in South Africa. They were originally housed in Wantage but are now in various venues including Royal Army Military College Sandhurst. 620 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 51, 61. 621 Temple, A.6.6. No 69: 31, 33. 622 Temple, A.6.6. No 69:76. 623 The Connoisseur, August 1915: 248.

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“great intelligence in the selection of her moment, and in the means

she has found of indicating the peculiar elements and incidents of the

charge, the retreat and the rally”, Butler was now pilloried for

focussing on the exceptional, the “dazed and bewildered soldier”

returning from the charge, especially as, it was stated, “the great

majority were ready to do it again”.624 Clearly, manliness and

patriotism were to be encouraged at this stage of the war at the

expense of an exploration of the adverse consequences of battle, a

sentiment which dismissed out of hand any merits in Butler’s work,

and calls into question the curator’s selection from her oeuvre. It may

well be considered that in this climate, the more stirring Scotland

Forever! or the valiant tone of The Defence of Rorke’s Drift would

have been more appropriate. Psychological sensitivity had been set

aside in favour of dramatic action and those very qualities which had

caused Butler’s earlier popularity were now being used against her,

paradoxically at a time in her career when she employed them

sparingly, if at all. Nevertheless, reproductions of Balaclava, along

with the Roll Call and Steady, the Drums and Fifes! were still on

view in schools and private homes as evidence of her continuing

appeal with the public.625

The critic of the Athenaeum referred back to the time when Butler’s

paintings “made stronger claims than at present” along with other

“almost forgotten features of past Salons”.626 The review went on to

compare the exhibits adversely to the “superior actuality of the

instantaneous ‘snapshots’ with which we are flooded every

morning”, describing the great majority of the exhibits as

melodramatic rather than epic and where battle-painting had been

“thrown back on its powers–not telling the truth, but of surpassing it

in certain directions, whether in impressiveness, in cheap

624 The Times, 17 May 1876; the second quotation is from the Connoisseur, August 1915: 248. 625 Girouard, 1981: 267. 626 The Athenaeum, 26 June 1915: 576.

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sensationalism or in clarity”.627 While it singled out Wollen’s 1914

painting The 28th at Waterloo (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery) and

Gibb’s Battle of the Alma for their “hearty and spirited” presentation

“giving an impression of fighting as a kind of athletic sport for sturdy

men”, it recommended that “[p]robably for purposes of aesthetic

enjoyment we should scarcely linger before any of these pictures

very long”.628

The Times, too, was dismissive of the exhibition as a whole,

commenting that “[o]ften one has to say the best one can for pictures

that are exhibited for a charitable purpose” and along with the 1915

exhibits at the Royal Academy, artists were criticised for “seeking

inspiration [. . .] at secondhand”, just as the desire for first-hand

experience was growing.629 Indeed, the Studio, which appears to

have ignored the Guildhall exhibition altogether, remarks of the

Royal Academy hanging that there “is happily scarcely any

suggestion [. . .] that everything is not as usual in the world” and

there is “no hint that this country [. . .] is engaged in what is actually

a struggle for existence”.630 The critic for the Connoisseur wrote that

the “most striking feature” of the Guildhall exhibits “is the fine

display of French art”, eclipsing that of native artists.631 By way of

explanation, the article stated that “English battles have been fought

less for the defence of the soil than of the outlying wards of her far-

flung Empire” adding that “her army has hitherto been a class apart

from the rest of the people”.632 Spielmann endorsed this approach in

his critique of Crofts’ work, opining that the British “have not

experienced the terrible advantage of having the horrors of a

campaign brought vividly before [them] on [their] own soil” arguing

that “only the nation which has felt the fangs of the war-hound in its 627 The Athenaeum, 26 June 1915: 576. 628 The Athenaeum, 26 June 1915: 577. 629 Harrington, 1992: 50-51, quoting The Times, May 1916 and Collins Baker in the Saturday Review, 1 May 1915. 630 The Studio, vol. 65, 1915: 25; it does however comment that it “has a right to be remembered as being above the average in general quality”. 631 The Connoisseur, vol. 42, August 1915: 245. 632 The Connoisseur, vol. 42, August 1915: 248.

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flesh, and has watched the flames burning its own homesteads” could

fully appreciate the “agony of international strife”.633

Amongst the British entries, the Connoisseur praises Woodville’s

Saving the Guns at Maiwand for being “perhaps the most spirited

picture in the exhibition” and for “the movement and action of the

frantically galloping horses” whose vigour “carries conviction to the

spectator”.634 Wollen, though singled out for praise by the

Athenaeum, is not mentioned at all in this review, and Charlton,

whose work was said to be similar to Woodville’s but “less

vigorous”, and Crofts only merit a sentence each.635 Instead,

Charlton was left to fall back on his native Newcastle for a solo

exhibition in 1917.

Known as the “Laureate of the hunting-field”, Charlton was not born

into an artistic family and spent several years as an apprentice in a

large engineering works before being encouraged by his employers

to spend one day a week on his study of painting.636 He was much

influenced by the work of his fellow Northumbrian, the engraver

Thomas Bewick, whose two surviving sisters took a great interest in

his work. Like Butler and Crofts, Charlton frequently eschewed

conflictual battle scenes, using his study of horses to invoke the

atmosphere and the “feelings of the absent [human] protagonists”.637

His solo exhibition featured seven oil paintings on a war theme, five

from before the First World War and two paintings from 1915 not

seen at the Guildhall. Both these latter are on extremely large

canvases. His French Artillery Crossing the Flooded Aisne (fig.60)

measures 112 by 183.5 centimetres, and was exhibited at the Royal

Academy in 1915, eliciting the comment in the Studio merely that it

633 Spielmann, 1901: 421. 634 The Connoisseur, vol. 42, August 1915: 248. 635 The Connoisseur, vol. 42, August 1915: 248. 636 De Walton, 1906: 619. 637 Hichberger, 1988: 90.

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is “of note”.638 It features retreating French cavalrymen converging

on a narrow, makeshift bridge over a river in full spate, waves

erupting like a spouting whale as they hit the side of the bridge. The

troops, in their dark blue uniform, are making their way in a

downward curve from top left to middle front, massing in smaller

groups as they are encouraged onwards by their fellow soldiers. The

last group is pictured silhouetted against the lightening sky and it is

evident from the reaction of one of the horses as it rears up that an

exploding shell has been dangerously near. To their right is an

abandoned gun carriage, possibly stuck in the heavy mud, whilst the

riders wave to the stragglers, shells exploding around them. On the

extreme right a solitary, deathly, figure stands on the brow of a hill

holding his sword aloft, symbolically, as if to block escape. Nearer to

the front another group is manipulating a gun carriage with difficulty

down towards the river. The central, foremost group is making its

way across a narrow, rickety bridge, their horses still linked together,

and it is this group which is the chief interest in the painting, as it

provides an opportunity for the viewer to observe closely the

presentation of its constituents. As they surge forward the men give

the impression of being more than a little out of control, much as in

Charlton’s earlier Placing the Guns, as the leader battles to hold on

tightly to the reins, leaning over to steady his mount, while at the

same time trying to manage a second, riderless, horse alongside. It is

clear he is concentrating hard, his chin pressed down on his hollowed

out chest as he holds on grimly. Behind him, his fellow soldier is

looking down and away from the front of the canvas, his eyes shaded

by the peak of his cap. He is followed by a third soldier, crouching

over his horse’s neck, again leaning away from the front; the fourth

has no expression as he looks vacantly up and the face of the fifth is

hidden. The horses, meanwhile, show real fear in their bloodshot

eyes, pulled back ears and flaring nostrils. Careful attention has been

paid to their physique with graded differentiation of a close-toned

palette to highlight the musculature, with the judicial use of white to 638 The Studio, vol. 65, 1915: 26, 29.

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indicate a sweaty sheen. Beneath them the river to the right of the

bridge resembles a whirlpool as it crashes round a fallen tree, and is

only slightly more blue-grey in colour than the slippery wet mud on

the bridge and the surrounding earth.639

The tension in the painting is created by the danger the troops face

from both the enemy to their rear and the fragile bridge before them.

How are all these men on their frightened, galloping horses to

manage such an insecure structure without falling off into the

swirling waters beneath? Charlton has inverted Butler’s device of the

“charge”, transforming it into a headlong retreat, much like

Woodville’s Saving the Guns at Maiwand, and coupled it with a

bridge of last resort in frenetic and desperate conditions. Even given

his customary reliance on horses for drama, I argue that by forcing

the retreating troops over such a perilous gateway to safety, Charlton

offers an insight into a greater, unknown, terror. These are frantic

men, both fleeing from and hurtling to their destruction from which

only good fortune is likely to save them, a cogent comment on the

progress of the war which for many similarly seemed chaotic and out

of control.640 Perhaps on account of its timing, this was not a popular

device and it is not surprising that this painting, with its far from

optimistic message, was not among those chosen for the Guildhall

exhibition, in spite of its obvious dramatic energy. This was an

exhibition which instead served to reinforce the solidity of London,

sitting squarely in the middle of a vast Empire, encapsulated in the

1904 painting Heart of the Empire by Niels Möller Lund (1863-

1916) (fig.61); a signal that above all here was a London both

powerful and, along with her allies, worth defending from the

aggressor, Germany.641 In the Guildhall exhibition there was no

room for despair.

639 I am told by the curator of the Laing Art Gallery that the painting is due for cleaning which may well make the colours more distinct. 640 This is a marked contrast to Charlton’s silence on the progress of the war in South Africa. 641 This painting now hangs in the Guildhall Art Gallery.

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Three months before the Guildhall exhibition, in March 1915, and in

marked contrast, the London Group was exhibiting at the Goupil

Gallery, London, showing works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-

1915), Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), Nevinson, Wyndham-Lewis,

Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) and William Roberts (1895-1980)

among others and whose critical reception was similarly

unfavourable, but for very different reasons.642 While Butler was

criticised for sentimentality and Charlton for being derivative, this

group was roundly censured for its unpatriotic, militaristic approach

and as Malvern has commented, was “popularly associated with

degeneracy and insanity”, echoing Clausen’s exhortations to his

students in 1913 to refer back to painters of an earlier age and to

avoid the modern “decadents”.643 By the time of the Guildhall

exhibition critical thinking had moved swiftly on, and the Vorticists’

solitary show at the Doré Art Gallery received positive reviews

acknowledging their efforts to use images of machinery to represent

the volatile state of the world around them.644

In the first decade of the new century, Butler had been busy “getting

up a ‘one-man-show’” to which she refers as the first of many.645 A

previous attempt to exhibit in Ireland in 1904 had been frustrated by

what she tantalisingly refers to an “absurd bungling in Dublin”, 642 Malvern, 2004: 5. 643 When Charlton’s Retreat from the Marne was shown at the Royal Academy in 1915, the Illustrated London News wrote that “the general character of this work reminds us too closely of the battle pieces of thirty years ago: there is nothing save in detail to identify it with the New War”, ILN 8 May 1915, cited by Harrington, 1992: 50; for Clausen’s advice see Clausen, 1913: 327, 339; for degeneracy see Black, 2004: 3, citing Arthur Clutton-Brock, art critic of The Times in March 1915, who regarded such work as “debased”, and a product of German philosophy, and it is of note that Max Nordau had published his widely translated work Degeneration in 1892, attacking degenerate modern art. In addition, Malvern cites Claude Phillips, art critic of the Daily Telegraph who regarded modern art as an infection or disease, Malvern, 2004: 5; Tickner, 2000: 186 cites Charles Ricketts in his critique of “some sort of decivilising change, latent about us, which expresses itself especially in uncouth sabotage, Suffragette and post-Impressionism, Cubist and Futurist tendencies”. The same argument was reproduced in the Second World War, Powers, 2013: 155. 644 Black, 2004: 35 cites Frank Rutter, critic of the Sunday Times, who was especially positive. 645 Butler, 1993: 239.

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resulting in her description of a “blank year for me artistically, I

fear”.646 Rather than exhibiting battle paintings in oil, she began to

concentrate mainly on watercolours with the occasional oil painting,

including a landscape entitled Homeward in the Afterglow: A

Cistercian Shepherd in Medieval England which, she writes, gave

her “a period of the most exquisitely reposeful work”, but which was

not well received when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1908.647

Butler reflected in her autobiography that the public made it clear

they did not want idylls from her, but “soldiers and horses”.648

Her paintings, however, continued to be reproduced as prints, as

evidenced by her letters to her sister, firstly in August 1902 when she

writes that “my drummers are to be engraved by Goupil”, and again

in 1915 expressing her astonishment at “the wonderful way” in

which Halt! had been reproduced in Holly Leaves.649 One painting

she did send to the Academy was Rescue of Wounded, Afghanistan

(fig.62) in 1905. Although delighted when it was well hung, she did

not find a purchaser, possibly because the landscape resembled too

much that of the South African Veldt, possibly because the subject-

matter was insufficiently engaging or topical, but possibly also on

account of the decline in demand for large-scale paintings of this

sort.650 More probably, Butler was no longer approaching her work

646 Butler, 1993: 239; DA: 1164, letter Butler to her son, Dom Urban Butler, 27 March 1904 (uncatalogued), though she gives no further information with regard to the “bungling”, see Dennehy, 1909: 27-33 for an account of the attempts in 1904 to set up an exhibition in Dublin. 647 Butler, 1993: 241. This painting is also referred to as Homeward in the Afternoon: A Cistercian Shepherd in Medieval England; Spencer-Smith and Usherwood, 1987: 27 comment that it “received no acclaim”. In her autobiography Butler is unclear as to the date and venue of this first exhibition, although the first mention of her working towards it is in 1904. There is no record of an exhibition prior to 1912 in the National Art Library at the V & A which holds the catalogues for the other shows mentioned and it is likely that she is referring to the 1912 exhibition. 648 Butler, 1993: 241-42. 649 HHG: letter Butler to Alice Meynell, 12 August 1902 (uncatalogued); this could refer either to her watercolour Royal Horse Artillery Halt! (c1893) (Royal Collection) or to Halt on a Forced March: Peninsular War, 104-105 (1892) (King’s Shropshire Light Infantry Regimental Trustees). 650 This was especially so, given her earlier disappointment in the poor hanging of Dawn at Waterloo in 1895, Butler, 1993: 194-95; it now hangs in the Army Staff College at Shrivenham, Wiltshire; Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987:172-73

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in the manner which had first brought her to public attention and it is

as if her more radical approach to the effects of war on the ordinary

soldier had been permanently blunted by the recent experience of

vitriolic pro-Boer attacks perpetrated on her husband, leading her to

retreat onto safer, less controversial ground.651 As evidence of her

enduring caution, Butler confided in her sister that when Lord

Roberts was due to dine at her home in September 1901 her

“conversation during dinner will be studiously oblivious of the

War”.652 General Butler, meanwhile, was busy retrieving his

reputation in his evidence to the enquiry on the war, and I suggest

that this, combined with a lack of public interest in battle painting,

could account for her more traditional treatment of soldiers by

removing them from the main focus of the painting, concentrating

rather on the horses, as in The Yeomanry Scouts on the Veldt and

Rescue of Wounded, Afghanistan, at the expense of a more critical

character study.

It is well documented that Butler had been working hard to remedy

what she perceived to be her deficiencies of tone, and Millais’

remark in 1875 that she “draws better than any of us, but I wish her

tone were better” struck deep.653 She was pleased with the results in

her 1905 painting which highlights the back view of a horse, rearing

up as his rider dismounts to assist an injured soldier lying in the path

of the distant, but advancing, enemy. Here she catches the light on

the horse’s mane and rear quarters so that the tail shimmers like pale

salmon silk, mirrored by the grey and salmon highlights on the

horse’s back. A second horse rolls over in the shadow cast by its

companion’s front hooves, throwing up a cloud of sandy dust as it

attribute the lack of interest in the painting to the time delay, especially when compared with Woodville’s painting Saving the Guns at Maiwand over twenty years earlier. 651 General Butler died in 1910. Their daughter, Eileen Gormanston in writing about her parents’ relationship refers to her mother “in whom loyalty was an outstanding quality”, Gormanston, 1953: 33. 652 HHG: Butler to Alice Meynell, 5 September 1901 (uncatalogued). 653 Butler, 1993: 238; Millais made this remark after having seen her painting Quatre Bras at the Royal Academy.

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falls. A third horse is being ridden hard by a soldier carrying away an

injured colleague to safety. Notwithstanding its painterly qualities,

the picture suffers from the smaller size of the figures as against the

expanse of the barren landscape; Butler is distancing herself from

character development by removing the opportunity. Instead, the

drama of the work, much as in Woodville’s Saving the Guns at

Maiwand, emanates from the dangerous action of rescue itself and is

very different in approach to her earlier emphasis on individual

suffering.

Meanwhile, the Roll Call continued to attract public acclaim as was

evident from its reception at an international exhibition in Dublin in

1907, where Alfred Temple had been appointed Honorary Director

of the Gallery of Fine Arts, and whose assistance was described in

the catalogue as “priceless”.654 In his speech on 25 October 1907

Temple referred specifically to Edward VII who, contrary to his

normal practice, had “graciously lent the famous “Roll Call”, which,

I believe, has been one of the most popular attractions of the Art

Section”.655 Butler makes no mention in her autobiography of

Scotland Forever! and a photogravure of Steady, the Drums and

Fifes! which also featured in the exhibition.656

In the period between the turn of the century and the outbreak of

World War One, Butler exhibited only six paintings at the Academy,

partly owing to her low profile during the Boer War and partly on

account of her writing, publishing two books of her travels.657 It was 654 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 36; Dennehy, 1909: xc. This exhibition was somewhat controversial as being more international than Irish. It was run by the owner of the Irish Daily Independent, William Martin Murphy, a publication appealing rather to the Catholic middle-class, of whom Butler was a member, Fanning, 2007: 24; Dennehy, 1909: 30. 655 Dennehy, 1909: 120. 656 Dennehy, 1909: xciv, cxxi; Crofts and Edwin Abbey were also represented, but Woodville, Charlton, Giles and Wollen are all absent. 657 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 124; the two books are Letters from the Holy Land, written for her mother and published in 1905 and From Sketch-Book and Diary in 1909. Butler writes to her sister on 19 January 1910 that she was very pleased with the book review in the Athenaeum concluding that some “very kind friend must have written it”, HHG: 19 October 1910 (uncatalogued letters).

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not really until 1911 that she started to focus again on military

painting, significantly, one year after the death of both her husband

and her mother. It was then that she resumed preparations for her

solo show, which she subsequently regarded as a “success” and a

“social rendezvous for one’s friends”.658 The King had again lent the

“good old Roll-Call”, which was placed centre stage when the

exhibition opened in 1912 at the Leicester Galleries.659 Although

supplemented by other military works along with drawings from her

travels in Italy, Egypt and Ireland, it was clear from the review in

The Times that it was still the Roll Call which appealed to the public

in preference to her later paintings.660 The Times critic clearly

approved of her work on this occasion, flatteringly likening her style

to that of Rembrandt and Velasquez, a reference perhaps to her more

painterly qualities, anticipating Frances Spalding’s view that the

“tonal acuity found in Edwardian painting owed much to the

example of Velasquez” in particular.661

In the same year as the Guildhall and Vorticist exhibitions, Butler

staged her next solo show, also at the Leicester Galleries, a centenary

exhibition specifically to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo, “that

inexhaustible battle”.662 1915 was a difficult year for Britain, with

the war continuing past the expected return of the troops by

Christmas 1914; the British Expeditionary Force had been repulsed

and forced to retreat from Mons, the landings at Gallipoli had been

disastrous and the casualties were already high, with no obvious end

in sight, in what must have seemed a reprise of the war in South

Africa. Fears of a German invasion had been heightened by the naval

attacks on Scarborough and Hartlepool and the aerial attacks on the

south east of England. The Preface to the catalogue seeks to address

these fears and disappointments with a sentence from Napoleon’s 658 Butler, 1993: 251. 659 Butler, 1993: 251. The King in question this time was George V; the ratio of military to other works was approximately fifty-fifty. 660 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 36, quoting The Times, 13 June 1912. 661 Spalding, 1986: 11. 662 Butler, 1993: 252.

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Correspondence extolling the fighting spirit of the British stating that

the “French, though fewer in number (than the Allied and Prussian

armies), would have won the victory but for the obstinate and

unconquerable bravery of the British troops which alone prevented

them.”663 It is not surprising, therefore, that in this show the highlight

was the patriotic and popular Scotland Forever! with its energising

charge of the Scots Greys. Of the remaining twenty-five exhibits,

twenty-four were watercolours and the twenty-fifth, On the Morning

of Waterloo. The Cuirassier’s Last Réveil, (fig.63) was painted in oil.

Just as Butler tentatively wondered “[w]ho will look at my

‘Waterloos’ now?”, she expressed her personal satisfaction with the

light effects captured in her new painting by rising with the alarm

clock at 2.30 each morning.664 She declared it to be the “best ‘show’

[she] had yet had at the Leicester Galleries”, possibly on account of

the influential patronage of Queen Mary, possibly on account of a

renewed licence to war artists to paint the picturesque.665 Restricted

to the dull tones of khaki since the last decade of the nineteenth

century, Butler was swift to revert to the technicolour of regimental

dress as part of the centenary celebrations even as she was asking

herself “why dress up grim war in all that splendour”.666

Against the entry for On the Morning of Waterloo, the catalogue

includes the following quotation One thing I shall never forget is the moment when I woke in the morning; the bells of the villages rang for Matins over that great plain; and, looking at the crops beaten down, my comrades lying asleep to right and left, the grey sky, such a vast desolation made my heart shudder [. . . ] I said to myself this is Sunday, a day of rest and peace [. . .] But the roll of the drums was now beginning, a dull, sinister sound in the humid air. Towards the high road, to the left,

663 VAM (Waterloo Centenary, 1815-1915: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures by Lady Butler) May/June 1915: 213: 1, citing Napoleon’s Correspondence, xxiv: 240. 664 Butler, 1993: 258. 665 Butler, 1993: 258, 253. 666 Butler, 1993: 256.

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they were beating the ‘Assembly’; the trumpets of the Cavalry were sounding ‘le Réveil’.667

This elegiac description of “the uncertain hour before the morning”,

could equally apply to her 1893-95 painting, Dawn of Waterloo,

suggesting that the intention behind this new work was similar in its

focus on the nervous tension before battle.668 In fact, the paintings

are very different. Whereas in the earlier painting she concentrated

on the expressions of the men as they awoke on the dawn of battle,

here Butler has restricted her vision to the four horsemen sounding

the réveille in the early morning light, resonating with appropriately

apocalyptic images. All four, centrally placed, are mounted on

splendid white horses reminiscent of the brilliant greys in Scotland

Forever! They catch the light as it falls on them gradually as the sun

rises across the canvas, from right to left so that the horse on the left

is mostly in shade, while his companion on the right is bathed in

light.669 The soldiers, dressed in blue with red epaulettes, white

jacket fronts and elaborate blue and gilt helmets, are sounding their

trumpets, watched from the distance by a single mounted officer.

Signs of camp fires can just be seen behind him. The absence of

other activity creates a somewhat eerie sensation of calm before the

battle. The narrative of this morning scene, as the horses seem to

emerge from an impressionistic mist, conveys a very different

emphasis to that of its predecessor by avoiding a more intimate

examination of the men’s faces and body language. Unusually,

Butler did not use live models for this painting, writing of her

preparations “I had modelled a little grey horse and a man, and set

them up on my balcony, facing in the right direction, and there I

waited with palette spread, for the dawn.”670 Instead of dwelling on

667 VAM, (Waterloo Centenary, 1815-1915: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures by Lady Butler) May/June 1915: 7; the quotation is from Waterloo by Erchmann-Chatrian. 668 T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding. 669 Butler explains in her autobiography how she had to work quickly as “the first ray of sunrise would spoil all” and so had to restrict herself to “all-important dabs”, Butler, 1993: 252. 670 Butler, 1993: 252.

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the mixed emotions of the waking men so strongly emphasised in the

earlier painting, with their “fine Irish faces”, this painting privileges

the rousing call of the réveille. It is designed to stir the blood before

gallant action as the trumpeters are profiled against the horizon and, I

suggest, aptly underlines the patriotic fervour which celebration of

the centenary of Waterloo was intended to inspire.671

The exhibition as a whole was reviewed, not unsympathetically, by

the Sketch, professing that “the failure of the Royal Academy to

produce any battle-pieces looking like war as the modern soldier

knows it renders the re-appreciation of Lady Butler’s work all the

keener”.672 This may, as Hichberger suggests, indicate Butler’s

renewed popularity at the start of World War One, but I argue is

equally indicative of the difficulties for artists, especially in the early

days of the war, in finding suitable material.673 Not only were artists

not sent out in an official capacity until 1916, but even when they did

go, it was often difficult to send back work representing war in the

manner for which they had been commissioned. Muirhead Bone, for

example, whose remit was to draw ruins, initially found nothing but

mud.674 Those artists who were able to experience the war zone

before 1916 did so by virtue of their status as soldiers or medical

personnel and the like. Even so, they were confronted with the

dilemma of either providing a historical document or making a good

picture, and as Alan Powers has observed very few were able to do

both.675 That the Sketch was able to comment on Butler’s work in a

positive way is likely to reflect as much the nationalistic propaganda

the exhibition was designed to promote as the quality of the works on

display, denoting a clear difference between her reception in this

Waterloo themed exhibition and the more eclectic Guildhall show,

which also featured paintings from the Crimea and Peninsular Wars.

671 Butler, 1993: 184. 672 Cited in Harrington, 1993: 306-308. 673 Hichberger, 1988: 106. 674 Harries, 1983:10. 675 Powers, 2013: 155.

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During this centenary year there were many attempts, both popular in

the form of posters and in the illustrated press as well as in academic

paintings, to capitalise on patriotic sentiment in aid of the war effort

especially in the run up to the introduction of conscription in 1916.

Scotland Forever! was listed in the catalogue accompanied by two

stirring quotations. The first from Siborne’s History of the Waterloo

Campaign reads As the Scots Greys passed through and mingled with the Highlanders, the enthusiasm of both corps was extraordinary. They mutually cheered. Scotland Forever! was their war shout [. . .] without pausing for a moment to reform, those of the Greys who had forced their way through [. . .] the mass (of French Infantry) rushed boldly onward against the leading supporting column of Marcognet’s right brigade.

The second is from the last survivor of the charge, Sergeant-Major

Dickson, who recalled that “[i]t was a grand sight to see the long line

of giant grey horses dashing along with flowing manes and heads

down” with the “men, in their red coats and tall bearskins” who

“were cheering loudly and the trumpets were sounding the

charge”.676 Butler wrote to her sister that the “Private View was a

brilliant success” with “hardly place to move in the crush”,

concluding that “‘Scotland for Ever’ [sic] pounds its way, as it were,

through the delicate watercolours”.677 The popularity of this image

was reinforced the same year when it was reproduced in a German

New Year card, wishing the troops a safe and speedy return home,

and with Prussian troops replacing the Scots Greys.678 Even in the

twenty-first century, references to Waterloo are not without their

resonance and it is certain that the bi-centenary similarly will not

676 VAM, (Waterloo Centenary, 1815-1915: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures by Lady Butler) May/June 1915: 213: 5. 677 HHG: Butler to Alice Meynell, 30 May 1915 (uncatalogued). 678 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 83; the Prussians and British were allies at Waterloo.

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pass by unnoticed regardless of simultaneous commemorations of the

First World War.679

Butler had not been able to travel out to the Front and her

opportunities for representing modern warfare were restricted to her

imagination, limited photography, second-hand reportage and

personal observation from her visits to her “soldier son” Patrick in

the New Forest before he left for France.680 It is clear that she

quickly grasped the new nature of this war and as early as September

1914 was writing in her diary that “here we are pouring soldiers into

the great jaws of death in hundreds of thousands, and sending poor

human flesh and blood to face the new ‘scientific’ warfare”.681

Accustomed as she was to spending time with soldiers throughout

her married life, she observed the difference in the men’s bearing in

their “quiet seriousness quite new to me. They are going to look

death straight in the face”.682

Butler continued to exhibit at the Leicester Galleries, until 1919.683

After her “Waterloo” exhibition she had promised to “turn all [her]

attention to this stupendous war”.684 Her first “khaki” show,

Glimpses of the Great War in 1917, carried a personal apologia for

painting war pictures in which she invited her audience to consider

the proposition “[m]ay not the sensitive painter, who shrinks from

too near an approach, share, after all, the truer insight?”685 It is

679 Nelson, too, was popular as evidenced by Fred Roe’s painting The Toast of Britain, used as a print by Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, in which Benjamin West is seen toasting Nelson at a Royal Academy banquet, Harrington, 1992: 47. For the commemoration of Waterloo, see Bonaparte and the British at the British Museum in 2015; Bonaparte’s enduring fascination is evident by his placing above Shakespeare in a poll conducted by the Guardian in January 2014, Guardian, 1 February 2014. 680 Patrick, her eldest son was A.D.C. to General Capper, 7th Division. It was his idea that she should see an army under war conditions, Butler, 1993: 253. 681 Butler, 1993: 253; she repeats these sentiments in a letter to her sister, HHG: 26 September 1914 (uncatalogued). 682 Butler, 1993: 254; this resonates with Keegan in his discussion of how Sandhurst recruits come face to face with the prospect of war, Keegan, 2004: 18. 683 Malvern, 2004: 37. 684 Butler, 1993: 258. 685 VAM (Glimpses of the Great War) May/June 1917: 242: 3.

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evident here that she recognised her handicap in not personally

experiencing war, just as she reflected on the possibility that distance

from the scene might give her an equal, if not greater, emotional

understanding. Her exhibition, although opening “with most

satisfactory éclat”, fell short of this promise, including as it did

several posed portraits of winners of the Victoria Cross and her 1897

painting, Steady, the Drums and Fifes! previously exhibited at the

Guildhall, which, in its rich red regimental colours, could hardly be

described as a “khaki” exhibit.686 In any event, none of these

captured the sense of the Western Front and they did little to

encourage public interest in her work.

Two watercolours which did show scenes from World War One were

The London Irish at Loos (1916) (fig.64), depicting a charge as in

Scotland Forever! but by the infantry rather than the cavalry, and the

processional Eyes Right (1916), both paintings representing soldiers

in khaki dress.687 The first refers to an episode when the London

Irish kicked a football across No Man’s Land into the German lines,

and appears to have been commissioned for a book by Wilfred

Meynell according to a letter from Butler.688 The painting shows the

men, rifles in hand, rushing forward courageously, striding over their

injured colleagues towards an invisible enemy, but exhibits little of

Butler’s earlier emphasis on the traumatic nature of war. Rather,

these soldiers are caught up in the moment, their adrenalin driving

them on with little thought for the consequences of their action, fed

on the traditional view that war encapsulated glory, honour and

charges. The pounding horses of Scotland Forever! are substituted

by the onward rush of the men as they follow their leader, arm aloft

as he dribbles the football towards the enemy lines, Butler adopting,

and adapting, her own formula of the charge. As in On the Morning 686 Butler, 1993: 259. 687 According to Michael Lee, Eyes Right was painted in aid of the Red Cross; see also Country Life 18 January 1979 cited in HHG: T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 155. 688 Butler writes that she would be “delighted to do the footballer for your very promising book-but it must be in watercolour”, HHG: letter, Butler to Wilfred Meynell, 22 February 1916 (uncatalogued).

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of Waterloo and her Boer war paintings, Butler pays great attention

to her technique, and in particular the way the light is refracted

through the rain, with the use of soft greys, blue, white and pink. It is

currently exhibited in the regimental museum of the London Irish in

Camberwell with the caption Only at a point on the right there was some confusion and a little irregularity. Were the men wavering? No fear! The boys on the right were dribbling the elusive football towards the German trench.689

Like Woodville’s earlier twentieth century paintings on Napoleonic

themes this painting is small, measuring thirty centimetres by

twenty-five centimetres and may reflect Butler’s awareness of the

increasingly domestic market alongside her own declining popularity

as much as its future literary destination.

Eyes Right (fig.65) is a more familiar example of her oeuvre as it

depicts a weary and injured group of men marching past a wayside

crucifix in advance of the field ambulance. As they do so, they look

up to the image of the crucified Christ for sustenance. Although

situated after the battle, like the Roll Call and Return from Inkerman,

this portrayal lacks the psychological intensity of her early career,

mainly on account of the distance of the figures from the viewer as in

Rescue of Wounded and may owe its composition to the popular

reproduction in the 1914 Graphic Christmas edition of The Great

Sacrifice by James Clark (1858-1943), where a dead soldier and a

dreamlike crucified Christ are juxtaposed.690

That Eyes Right enjoyed some popularity is reflected in its

reproduction as a photogravure published by George Pulman and

Sons Limited and the Leicester Galleries, who clearly believed

Butler still to carry commercial interest.691 Certainly, she was topical

689 Citing The Great Push by Patrick MacGill published in 1916. 690 The original of this painting was bought by Queen Mary but was widely reproduced in churches and elsewhere. 691 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 146.

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in her choice of subjects during this period for she writes how one

painting The Avengers (date and location unknown) “was done under

the impulse of great indignation, for Nurse Cavell had been

executed”.692 Probably the most dramatic of her exhibits was The

Dorset Yeomanry at Agagia, 26th Feb.1916 (1917) (Dorset County

Council) a large oil painting, commissioned by Colonel Goodden and

presented to the county of Dorset by Lord Portman.693 Unusually this

charge features more of the enemy than the British troops in their

“flowing burnouses, which helped the movement” and who she

represented, “rather reluctantly”, posing at their machine guns.694 In

her autobiography Butler explains that, like Giles in his 1884

painting, Charge at El Teb, Sudan, she had striven to represent

individual officers for the benefit of the regiment, and that [o]ne of the most difficult things in painting a war subject is the having to introduce, as often happens, portraits of particular characters in the drama. Their own mothers would not know the men in the heat, dust, and excitement of a charge, or with the haggard pallor on them of a night watch. In the Dorset charge all the officers were portraits.695

As with her 1879 commission from Queen Victoria, The Defence of

Rorke’s Drift (fig.14), I suggest that this painting suffers from

Butler’s anxiety to meet her patron’s instructions to show conflict

and to privilege named officers over naturalistic presentations of

soldiers during a battle.

Her final solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1919, Some

Records of the World War, required the assistance of her brother-in-

law, Wilfred Meynell, Butler complaining that “Mr Phillips” was

“treating [her] in the most inexplicable manner”.696 Already in 1916,

Leicester Galleries had been hosting very different types of

exhibitions, including a solo exhibition by Nevinson and in 1918

692 Butler, 1993: 259. 693 Butler, 1993: 259-60. 694 Butler, 1993: 260. 695 Butler, 1993: 260. 696 HHG: letter Butler to Wilfred Meynell, 30 August 1918 (uncatalogued).

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paintings by Nash and Kennington, and were moving away from the

type of works exhibited by Butler. None of these artists appeared to

be in sympathy with her approach to representations of the Great

War which, as Meynell’s necessary intervention shows, was

becoming marginalised in a venue where she had been exhibiting

since before the outbreak of war.

As Fox has noted, the Leicester and Goupil galleries were already

withdrawing financial support from their less commercially attractive

artists during the course of the war, relying more on group

exhibitions than solo artists for maximum interest.697 Butler’s latest

exhibition coincided with the Royal Academy’s showing of The

Nation’s War Paintings in which she took no part, but instead

featured the work of artists such as Wyndham Lewis, Nash and

Roberts, though singularly not Nevinson, all by then official war

artists and, as such, not only accepted, but promoted by the

establishment.698 Butler’s catalogue this time contained no preface,

the artist remaining silent in the hope that the paintings would speak

for themselves. As before, there is an emphasis on portraits of

military personnel, several sketches and marches, such as the post

war narrative watercolour entitled Back to his Land (1919)

(Manchester City Art Galleries) accompanied by a prosaic caption

taken from an officer’s letter describing that “[o]ur marches were

long and heavy [. . .]. One evening we passed a pathetic old peasant

ploughing his desolate field. The Grenadiers gave him a cheer but he

seemed too dazed to understand”.699 Hampered by her lack of direct

personal observation, Butler was, however, assisted in her

watercolour The Charge of the Warwickshire and Worcester

Yeomanry at Huj, 8th November 1917 (Warwickshire Yeomanry

697 Fox, 2009: 108. 698 Bennett comments (rather triumphally) that “not one RA did I descry at the private view”, Bennett, 1919: 347; Nevinson complained that his Harvest of Battle was omitted from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and was “hidden away in one of the smaller rooms” in the British war art exhibition later that year, Nevinson, 1937: 123. 699 VAM (Glimpses of the Great War) May/June 1919: 276: 6.

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Trust) – a particularly bloody engagement and likened to the Charge

of the Light Brigade at Balaclava – by a detailed description from a

participant.700 As usual, there is little evidence of the enemy, the

painting dwelling on the cavalry as they come to the rescue of their

colleagues, but the representation lacks originality, having neither the

verve of Scotland Forever! nor the insight of Balaclava.

At the age of seventy-four, Butler’s last entry to the Royal Academy

came in 1920 with In the Retreat from Mons: the Royal Horse

Guards, a return to her ‘after the event’ theme, showing the

withdrawal of the wounded troops from the battle front along a pot-

holed route marked with the debris of conflict. Abandoned gun

carriages, saddles and equipment are scattered across the canvas past

dead and dying horses. Mounted troops lead riderless horses

accompanied by the odd infantry soldier. Notwithstanding their

obvious injuries, however, these men do not appear dejected as in

Balaclava and Return to Inkerman but instead look forward in a

spirit of sober stoicism as they make their way back to safety. In

1921, Butler found a purchaser for this work in the Durban Art

Gallery and it is tempting to speculate that her short stay in South

Africa, or possibly an Irish connection through Hugh Lane, may have

raised her profile and consequent interest in her work at the Cape.701

Six years later she painted a smaller version (fig.66) in which she

altered the formation, expanding the tight grouping of the earlier

canvas. Art historians have argued that this led to a loss of

immediacy in impact, but I suggest that it is no less powerful as a

result and that the looser arrangement of the troops reflects the more

disjointed nature of their retreat.702 It remained unsold in Butler’s

lifetime, and in a letter from her son Patrick to his brother Dom

700 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 149. 701 It is of note that Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to design the art gallery in Johannesburg after the Boer War, highlighting the artistic connection between Britain and the then South African colony; it is also significant that in the year of the Dublin exhibition where Butler exhibited, Hugh Lane was busy with the establishment of Dublin’s Municipal Art gallery, Gregory, 1973:78. 702 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 152.

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Urban Butler the year after her death it is clear that the family had

been trying unsuccessfully to sell this smaller painting to the

“Blues”. Patrick writes that he is aware that “in darling Mom’s

pictures there seem touches that regiments don’t like [. . .]. They are

so stupidly particular sometimes” and speculates that in this case the

touch was “[t]hat man with (I think) his arm in a sling”.703 In the

event, Patrick presented the painting to the Royal Hospital for

Pensioners, Chelsea, where it remains today.704

Exhibiting History The Boer War stretched an old narrative to the limits and cracks in it reached through an Edwardian twilight to 1914705

Reflecting on the challenge facing late-Victorian war artists at the

turn of the century, it is fair to say that it was not easy to be a battle

painter when there was no popular contemporary war to represent.

After the treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902, Britain was not directly

involved in military conflict until the outbreak of war in August 1914

and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 attracted little attention in

Britain.706 None of the artists, such as Woodville, Crofts, Giles,

Butler, Wollen or Charlton, chose incidents from this conflict to

paint. Instead they drew inspiration from much earlier historical

subjects including the English Civil War and the perennially popular

Waterloo. In 1904, Woodville painted Scotland Yet! On to Victory,

featuring a charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo (Royal Scots

Dragoon Guards) and At the Trumpet’s Call (private collection)

which portrayed the battle of Marston Moor of 1644, but neither

703 DA correspondence Patrick Butler to Urban Butler dated 10 February 1934: 1164 (uncatalogued). He writes that he asked for 150 guineas but would have taken less, a massive reduction from the prices Butler was receiving in the 1870s, for example, £2000 for Listed for the Connaught Rangers evidenced by the agreement of 28 October 1878, BAM: Elizabeth Butler file, (uncatalogued). 704 It is not on view but is hung in the dining-room of the commandant; Patrick Butler also donated an oil painting, Wounded Guardsman, Crimea to the National Army Museum (ref: 6311-194-1) and Within Sound of the Guns to the Army Staff College, while his brother, Dom Urban Butler, presented Yeomanry Scouts on the Veldt to Downside Abbey. 705 Attridge, 2003: 188. 706 This lack of interest obtained in spite of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902.

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painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Two years later, he

produced a painting in watercolour and pencil, heightened with

white, entitled General Wolfe Climbing the Heights of Abraham on

the Morning of the Battle of Quebec, (fig.67) following West and

anticipating Derwent Wood by some four years.707 Significantly

smaller in size than his earlier canvases, this evokes a very different

mood and has echoes of Butler’s earlier Dawn of Waterloo, with its

subdued lighting, as the troops mount the heights before battle. The

dramatic coastline and sheer drop to the creek below emphasise the

daring of Wolfe’s planned assault as the soldiers scramble up the

cliff, grasping at clumps of vegetation for lack of firmer footholds.

One holds a flaming torch to light the way for his fellow soldiers,

while at the bottom of the cliff can be seen four rowing boats on their

way to discharge yet more troops. On the opposite side of the narrow

creek is another steep incline and through the gap can be seen the

war ships as they ferry the troops to battle.

On the top of the cliff stands Wolfe, hat in hand, with the moon

shining on his immaculate wig and forehead picked out in strong

white paint. Standing with his hand on the pommel of his sword,

right foot forward on a gentle mound, left leg firmly planted on the

lower ground, it is evident that he is in command of himself, the

situation and his troops. He inclines his head to face the front of the

canvas as he listens to his fellow officer, his expression serious, but

calm and confident. He is every inch the model soldier in his shiny

high leather boots, tight breeches and pristine buttoned jacket and,

like Joy’s Gordon, appears almost saintly, even Christlike, on the eve

of death, as he references West’s more famous representation of the

dying hero. To the right of Wolfe, and, at a suitably lower level,

stands his colleague, deferentially looking up to his general, and

beyond to the troops streaming off to the battlefield. Like Wolfe, he

is beautifully dressed; like Wolfe, he is motionless, exuding earnest

707 Derwent Wood’s sculpture was unveiled in 1911, IWM, War Memorial Archive online: 62175, accessed 22 April 2014.

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concentration in a manner very unlike Woodville’s more defiant

heroes of the Boer War. Neither can be said to be types, but are

individually and carefully drawn, to call attention to their sensitive

and intelligent characters. These are men of destiny, and one, at least,

we know will shortly be sacrificed to his calling, in a deliberate

fusion of religion and nationalism. There is no sense of Woodville

having rushed to complete this picture. Rather, we see a very

measured painting, which matches the danger and gravitas of the

situation, and one which privileges calm and careful planning over

derring-do. This is a work which invites the viewer to empathise with

the soldiers and to consider how it must feel to be at risk of death and

where survival is, to a large part, a matter of chance; a work which

offers the opportunity for reflection in the very pause before action,

at the height of the drama and where time appears to stand still in this

pre-dawn moment. Rather than portraying Wolfe mortally wounded,

Woodville has chosen to capture that intense moment before the

battle when soldiers become fully alive to their own mortality, that

very instant to which Tolstoy referred in his letter to his brother from

the Crimea. “There we all were,” he wrote “as always on the eve of a

battle [. . .] pretending not to think of the following day”, but all “at

the bottom of our hearts” feeling “a slight pang (and not even slight,

but pronounced) at the thought of the assault”.708 I suggest that this

change in Woodville’s approach signifies the lack of urgency to

produce battle paintings after the end of the Boer War and one which

enabled Woodville to develop a more contemplative presentation. It

is fitting in that it allows for an expansiveness through which the full

weight of Wolfe’s heroism and sacrifice can be appreciated in a

manner echoing that of West, even with its smaller size and different

materials. Just as the war in South Africa had “shifted the normal

paradigm of imperial conflict”, so war artists were left to consider

the effect of this unsatisfactory victory on public imagination,

adjusting their own approach to accommodate it.709 Here Woodville

708 Tolstoy cited by Figes, 2011: 184. 709 Briggs, 2007: 5.

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follows Butler both by rejecting conflict and by allowing himself the

luxury of dwelling on his more painterly techniques in a manner

previously denied – or deliberately avoided by – him when working

for the illustrated press; a style more suited to the quasi-religious

solemnity his picture explores. The reduced size of his work, I

suggest, reinforces the experimental nature of this new style, and is

in keeping with new and shifting market conditions.

To the front of the canvas, Woodville shows a number of ordinary

soldiers, one in a light coloured uniform bearing a large drum on his

back and looking up admiringly towards Wolfe from a crouching

posture reminiscent of the Sudanese troops in The Charge of the 21st

Lancers at Omdurman. In a further reference to West’s painting, a

Native American chief with full headdress stands to the left of

Wolfe, holding one arm across his chest, his weapon firmly pointing

down, as if to welcome Wolfe openly as a saviour to his country. In

choosing to represent Wolfe, in this period leading up to the First

World War, Woodville has selected a seminal historical episode of

immense cultural significance, confident that in doing so his

representation would be seen within a shared visual culture, and one

where his audience would be aware that the death of the hero is

imminent.710 At the same time, he has injected just that interstitial

element of nationalistic unease for the future which characterised the

first decades of the new century.

As in West’s painting, Wolfe is surrounded by his faithful followers

and although situated slightly off centre, there is no doubt that he is

the key interest. There is no sign of enemy troops in Woodville’s

representation and in West’s, they are in the far distance, privileging

the drama around the main figure. It is significant that at a time when

confidence in the armed forces was bruised, Woodville felt the need

to reassert British supremacy by reverting to an incident which

710 See Perry, 2012: 734-36 for a discussion of historical art references between genres.

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heralded Britain’s definitive victory over France in Canada.

Significantly, too, whereas West was in the forefront of history

painters choosing their subject-matter from contemporary events,

Woodville was profiling a one hundred and fifty year old hero.711

It was not long, however, before Woodville renewed his focus on the

Napoleonic Wars with no fewer than thirteen representations of this

period between 1900 and 1914. It is clear that he harboured a deep

admiration for the French Emperor with titles such as Poniatowski’s

Last Charge at Leipzig, (1912) (fig.68) Napoleon Crossing the

Bridge to Lobau Island, (1912) (fig.69) Napoleon Conferring the

Légion D’Honneur on a Russian General, 1804 (1912) (private

collection) and Marshall Ney at the Battle of Eylau, (1913) (fig.70)

all of which may indicate his disillusionment with British

commanders during the Boer War and before, even to the exclusion

of Wellington, notwithstanding the centenary of the battle was fast

approaching, affording war artists an opportunity of showcasing their

skills. When asked to contribute to the Guildhall Anniversary

Exhibition in 1915, however, of the three Woodville paintings on

display, only one, Napoleon Crossing the Bridge to Lobau Island,

made any reference to the Napoleonic Wars.712

It was with these wars that Woodville reverted to his previous rapid

style, as exemplified in Poniatowski’s Last Charge, where the

eponymous hero virtually leaps out of the canvas on his sweating

horse, thrusting his way forward, sword held straight out in front of

him. Dressed in the most gorgeous costume with white gloves, silver

braiding round his shoulders over a blue jacket with scarlet front, a

silver helmet with the initial N inscribed on the front, topped by an

elaborate red shako, silver plume and tassels, Poniatowski himself is

consummately theatrical, with his large sandy moustache and fierce

711 Mackenzie, 1999: 274. 712 Temple, A.6.6.No 69 where the catalogue refers to the painting as Napoleon Crossing to the Island of Lobau.

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glaring eyes. He is shown here as a man of action with no time for

reflection, and in a representation which has just that quality which

Woodville so astutely honed for his work in the illustrated press.

Similarly, the rapid brush strokes are loosely worked and make for

an unfinished appearance, with Poniatowski almost a caricature of

himself. Coincidentally, one year prior to this painting, an article

appeared in the press under the heading ‘The Making of the

‘Illustrated London News’. How the Paper is Produced each Week’

explaining that at times of exceptional pressure, “there is not a

moment’s delay between the completion of each drawing and its

dispatch to the block-makers for reproduction”, “for speed is then

more than ever important and is the thing most sought”.713 To

accompany the article is a photograph of the artists in the studio

(fig.71), featuring Woodville proudly “standing in the centre [. . .] at

the easle” [sic].714 A decade after peace was declared in South

Africa, artists as illustrators are once again being placed under

pressure to produce, notwithstanding the absence of war, obliging

them to fall back on history and their own imagination.

Napoleon Crossing the Bridge to Lobau Island (1912) (fig.69) is

very different in style and has much in common with Meissonier’s

more sombre procession, 1814: Campagne de France.715 As in this

earlier painting, Napoleon is shown leading his troops, but this time

across a cleverly constructed bridge of rafts pointing the French to

victory over the Austrians. He is followed by his command staff all

appearing relaxed as they turn to talk among themselves, watched by

the infantry as they pass by. The officers, as usual, are dressed

decoratively while Napoleon wears his characteristic sombre grey

greatcoat. Just as in the Meissonier painting, there is no dramatic

charge, and in fact no enemy troops, and has all the appearance of a

gentle hack in pleasant wooded landscape, and with oblique 713 ILN, 2 September 1911. 714 ILN, 2 September 1911. 715 This similarity was noted by the critic of the Connoisseur in a review of the 1915 exhibition at the Guildhall, Connoisseur, August 1915: 245.

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references to Butler’s device of the “march past”. Woodville is

relying on the viewers’ knowledge of Napoleon’s tactical skill in his

tribute to an admired hero rather than on any overt indication of

military brilliance.

Less hasty than his portrayal of Poniatowski, but still with

Woodville’s hallmark of dashing heroes, Marshal Ney leads his

troops forward with élan as he arrives late in the day to support

Napoleon, at what proved to be a pyrrhic victory and the first sign of

fallibility in the Grande Armée. As in his earlier painting, Saving the

Guns at Maiwand, Woodville has adapted Butler’s “charge” formula

to chime with his sense of the dramatic in this 1913 painting,

Marshal Ney at the Battle of Eylau (fig.70). Once again, prominence

is given to the exotic uniforms, depicted in great detail. Ney is

wearing a broad cummerbund which appears to shimmer with

genuine gold as it floats behind him in the wind. He is seated on the

most elaborate saddlecloth of crimson red with gold trim as his horse

charges forward, riding over a dead soldier lying face down, half

covered in snow. To the bottom left of the painting is a signature

exploding shell; to the bottom right, another dead soldier, dressed in

green, his rich golden headpiece with red pom-pom tassels lying at

his side. Interestingly, Woodville has shown greater characterisation

in both Ney and his older, white-haired companion than in his Boer

War pictures. As in the painting of Wolfe, neither are his usual types,

Ney throwing his head back determinedly as he exhorts his men to

follow, while the veteran’s face shows signs of duty combined with

an element of weary resignation, exemplifying the boredom and

exhaustion as well as the excitement of battle. In the run-up to World

War One, Woodville has, unusually, allowed his skills space to

develop, to delve beneath the surface of his earlier typography so as

to show a depth of character and experience previously rarely

pursued. It is also possible that Woodville saw in the smaller canvas

the opportunity for experimentation, without prejudice to his

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submissions to the Royal Academy, where he continued to exhibit

until his death in 1927.

These last three paintings are on extremely small canvases of

approximately thirty-five by twenty-five centimetres, smaller still

than the picture of General Wolfe, and in this are atypical of

Woodville’s earlier work. Saving the Guns at Maiwand for example

measures 148.6cms by 199.40cms, and The Charge of the 21st

Lancers at Omdurman, 153.4cms by 245.8cms. These later works

resemble genre rather than the history paintings more commonly

aspired to in military pictures, and is another indication of the

distancing of battle painters from this more elevated form. It is

difficult to account for certain for this change in practice other than

to suggest that Woodville was doubtful of securing a sale given what

he perceived to be a lack of interest in either military art in general,

or in more historical subjects, or possibly he was using them as

preliminary works for larger-scale paintings which never came to

fruition.

It is certainly indicative of thrift and experimentation in a fluctuating

market, which was beginning to focus on a more middle-class

clientèle, whose homes afforded smaller spaces in which to hang

paintings, while aristocratic, landed families were starting to sell

their collections overseas. As David Thompson of Goupil Gallery

wrote to Whistler in the 1890s, “[t]hings are very bad in London and

they will not be better for some time yet until this Baring business

altogether disappears”.716 Referring to large narrative paintings such

as those by Butler, the critic, George Moore, opined that the new art-

buying public wanted works that were “pleasant and agreeable”, that

would “fit their rooms and match their furniture”.717 Popular art

reviews in newspapers, tabloids and mass market periodicals were

716 Helmreich, 2005: 34; the Baring Brothers bank had crashed after Argentina had defaulted on its loans. 717 Helmreich, 2005: 40.

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designed to appeal to the “gallery-going middle-class” while their

shopping experience at department stores such as the newly

established Selfridges became as much social and cultural as

economic.718 Harrods, in its advertising literature, likened a visit to

the store to the opportunity of viewing a masterpiece in oil or

watercolour, as if shopping and art appreciation were

interchangeable, encouraging shoppers to craft their identities around

newly acquired works of art.719 Butler’s sister, Alice Meynell, wrote

in 1890 that “women have normally had more influence on the state

of the picture market than would appear from the names of the

buyers and sellers”, and with an increase in the intimate spaces for

such art to be exhibited, their influence grew.720 Citing Mica Nava,

Erika Rappaport comments that in this period “female consumers

were central to the working of the consumer economy and culture

and that theirs was a major, if overlooked narrative of modernity”.721

As art became more domesticated and available, together with soft

furnishings, it became part of the décor. This did not meet with

universal approval and in his critique of the new market, Fry was

dismissive of a lazy and undemanding public, which chose works

that were “restful and charming” as representing “pictures to live

with”, rather than more challenging works of art.722 It was this new

domestic market, I suggest, that Woodville was aiming for between

1902 and 1914 as an alternative to large-scale Academy works, using

familiar subjects and pleasant rural settings, and a clientèle he had

previously served in his work for the illustrated press.723

Woodville’s contemporary, Ernest Crofts, one of the very few

military artists of the late nineteenth century to become a member of

the Royal Academy, rarely ventured into the realm of current events

718 Fletcher, 2005: 161 who notes that Selfridges was opened in 1909 and exhibited that year’s rejected entries to the Royal Academy exhibition. 719 Fletcher, 2005: 162. 720 Meynell cited in Clarke, 2005: 140. 721 Rappaport, 2001: 28. 722 Fletcher, 2005: 159; Helmreich, 2005: 40. 723 Fletcher, 2005: 159.

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and concentrated largely on the English Civil War, producing

nostalgic views of both Roundheads and Cavaliers. His paintings

bore titles such as Oliver Cromwell at the Storming of Basing House

(Leeds City Art Gallery), completed in 1900 even while the Boer

War was still being fought. This was soon followed by The

Surrender of Donnington Castle (1903) (private collection),

Roundhead Patrol (1905) (private collection), The Funeral of

Charles 1, St, George’s Chapel, Windsor (1907) (Bristol Museum

and Art Gallery) and The Surrender of the City of York to the

Roundheads (1908).724 Trained partly in England, and, like

Woodville, partly in Düsseldorf, Crofts was in Germany at the time

of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and was able to follow the war

at close hand, though, not being an official war correspondent, was

not always allowed to see the actual fighting, and only able to

witness the scene of devastation the day after the battle.725 He first

exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, the year of the Roll Call,

with a painting from his recent experience, A Retreat: An Episode in

the French-German War (private collection), echoing Butler’s 1873

entry Missing.726 As with Butler, Crofts tended to avoid “the hammer

and tongs of war” and is praised by Spielmann for his “skilful

composition, his facile drawing”, “his refined treatment” and “his

spirited representation of soldiers and soldiering rather than of fights

and fighting”.727 Unlike Butler, however, the similarity did not

extend to emotional representation, for in many of Crofts’ works, the

soldiers are facing away from the viewer or are too far away for their

demeanour to be studied, his interest lying rather in subject matter,

724 Crofts was elected a Royal Academician and was subsequently, like Jones, appointed Keeper. The other late-Victorian war artist to become RA was Andrew Gow (1848-1920) who similarly chose his topics from the seventeenth century and Napoleonic Wars. 725 Spielmann, 1901: 424; this is true of his first experience at the Battle of Gravelotte, but although he was able to witness both the battle of Saarbrucken and Borny he made no contemporary sketches of either. 726 Spielmann, 1901: 424; in fact his first entry in 1873 was hung, then taken down and returned the following day. 727 Spielmann, 1901: 426; Spielmann similarly praises Butler’s early days, regretting that “after a year or two the promise was not fulfilled.” Spielmann, 1901: 423.

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looking backwards with some longing to historical scenes, precisely

at the point of a new century.728

Crofts’ Roundhead Patrol (fig.72), for instance, depicts a very

orderly mounted procession, another “march past”, moving towards

the front of the canvas. Without the title, the scene could almost be

mistaken for a gentle afternoon excursion and there is little hint of

the stress of war, somewhat akin to Woodville’s Napoleon Crossing

the Bridge to Lobau. The two leading horsemen are chatting with

each other as they walk their horses down a country lane between

leafless winter trees, followed by their troops. The one indication of

the seriousness of their purpose is the body armour worn by some,

though even here that of the front rider is obscured by his cloak. This

is an army at ease.

His 1908 painting, The Surrender of the City of York to the

Roundheads (fig.73) is similar in style. Once again a stately

procession of mounted soldiers is featured moving towards the front

of the canvas. This time it is situated firmly within its historical

context as the troops pass out of the city walls against the backdrop

of York Minster. They acknowledge the crowds, interspersed with

armed and controlling soldiers, who respond with raised hats. In the

background, signs of the devastation of the city can be seen in the

smoke rising up from behind the walls, but there is no sense of

agitation amongst the local population. These subjects were not a

new departure for Crofts, who had been attracted by historical scenes

throughout his career but, though praised by Lewis Lusk in 1904 for

his “telling study of ‘Prince Rupert and his Staff at Marston Moor’”

(Ipswich Museum and Art Gallery), had little of contemporary

interest.729 Crofts did not survive to see the outbreak of war in 1914.

728 See for example, To the Rescue: an Episode from the Civil War, (1896) (Royal Academy) Napoleon’s Last Grand Attack at Waterloo (1895) (private collection) and The Morning of the Battle of Waterloo (1876) (Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield). 729 Lusk, 1904: 182.

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Meanwhile Charlton continued to exhibit regularly at the Royal

Academy until his death in 1917 and, like Giles, was employed by

the Graphic, supplying the paper with many illustrations of horses,

sporting and battle scenes and historical subjects. Wollen reverted to

the rich soil of the Napoleonic Wars featuring subjects ranging from

Austerlitz to Waterloo as late as 1914, and though he had been sent

out by the Sphere to cover the events of the Boer War and continued

to exhibit battle scenes from the First World War, he features little in

contemporary reviews.

Notwithstanding Hichberger’s remarks on the upsurge of battle

paintings at the start of the twentieth century, it was very much a

niche market, for outside the world of the exhibitions, interest in

such art was at a low ebb and restricted to fellow artists, their friends

and hangers-on.730 As Harrington has observed, this was a world of

“minor academic pictures and occasional print royalties”, far

removed from the cultural heart of the nation.731 “We have to forgo

the hope of surprises” wrote the critic of the Manchester Guardian in

1915 in respect of the Royal Academy entries, for “pleasure must

come from the repetition of things that have pleased us before”.732

Ironically, just as the civilian population was relieved to put the

South African War and its consequences behind them, the market for

war art amongst military personnel was not helped by their

distraction following events in Europe. Accordingly even regimental

commissions had dried up almost completely, Butler’s painting for

Colonel Goodden an exception. The perception developed that battle

artists, too, were weary of war, their work becoming repetitive and

derivative, producing what the British War Memorials Committee

described in 1917 as “the colourless, academic reconstruction from

descriptive material, which has brought the art of the battle painter

into discredit”.733 730 Hichberger, 1988: 118. 731 Harrington, 1993: 301. 732 Cited in Harrington, 1992: 51. 733 Cited in Malvern, 2004: 76.

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I suggest however that this was a perception which did not take into

account the frustrations experienced by the older battle artists in their

inability to find novel material for their works, and in particular, to

experience war at first hand and to use that experience to inform their

artistic representations. The Illustrated London News, summed up the

problem rather neatly in 1915 complaining that the restrictions on

their artists’ movements meant that the “war is held at rather more

than arm’s length by the painters; and the painters, so far have been

held at rather more than arm’s length by the war”.734 As a result, it

continued, “[i]n no case has the easel been set up within sight of the

trenches and only in one or two cases do you receive so much as an

impression of actuality”.735 This applied equally to “Specials” used

to travelling to the seat of war, while artists sketching in Britain,

especially near the south and east coasts, were objects of suspicion.

Even such celebrities as Augustus John and Lavery were arrested

whilst drawing.736 William Rothenstein is said to have “implored”

his friend Colonel Replington of The Times to plead with the War

Office to allow artists to travel to the Front.737 “The average artist”,

as Kenneth Clark wrote in the Second World War, “will probably

want to go to the Front not simply out of curiosity or bravado but

because he may there discover some of the emotional stimulus on a

grand scale which is inevitably lacking from his everyday work”.738

None of these late-Victorian war artists was given the opportunity of

that experience.

Consequently, although the first few years of the 1914-18 War had

inspired work by Charlton, Woodville and Wollen, mostly for the

illustrated press, this was based on imagination, using historic battles

as their models. Notwithstanding the restrictions on movement, the

734 ILN, 8 May 1915 in an article The War and the Academy. 735 ILN, 8 May 1915. 736 John in Galway and Lavery by the Firth of Forth, Fox, 2009: 39. 737 Cited in Harries, 1983: 4. 738 Cited in Harries, 1983: 3.

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press was nevertheless keen to represent the war visually for those at

home. It had, after all, continued to engage with events overseas into

the twentieth century and both the Illustrated London News and The

Graphic sent artists and photographers to cover the Russo-Japanese

War of 1904 in spite of a general lack of interest, and were

determined to provide the public with news and visual images.739

The Graphic advertised urgently for war pictures from men or

officers at the Front, while the Illustrated London News engaged

various artists to produce military scenes in their photogravure series

Great War Deeds, Woodville producing pictures such as his stirring

illustration, The Winning of the First VC awarded to a Territorial: an

Heroic Exploit on Hill 60.740 Villiers, a veteran “Special” who

together with Prior “helped to both reflect and shape the popular

vision of the Empire at war” was overlooked by the British press but,

exceptionally, managed to send back some of the only drawings from

the front in the first two years of the war at the request of the French

and at a time when other civilian artists and photographers were

unable to get anywhere near the action.741 Nevertheless, as the war

progressed, there was a growing feeling, as expressed by Clive Bell,

that in the light of photographic advances narrative pictures were

“becoming otiose”; had perhaps military painting no longer

anywhere to go?742

739 Of the very few paintings resulting from this war, Villiers exhibited Sap and Shell in 1905 at Henry Graves and Co. and Henry Seppings Wright (1850-1937) A Shell Storm at Port Arthur at the Royal Academy in 1907, but neither attracted great interest. 740 Harrington, 1986: 46-47; ILN, 17 July 1915; this was an especially personal subject for Woodville given his commission in the National Reserve. 741 Quotation cited in Springhall, 1986: 54; see Harrington for Villiers’ activities, 1993: 304; Villiers was praised by the ILN, 3 July 1915 for his skill and devotion in providing the public with pictures “from the fighting-line”. 742 Bell, 1913: 18.

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Contemporary History Paintings and Public Entertainment It would leave a wrong impression to indicate that the general public

was becoming any less militant than in 1899.743 Indeed, the

humiliations of the war in South Africa had given an impetus to

militancy such that it has been viewed as possibly the defining

characteristic of the age.744 This was true not just in relation to armed

combat between nations, but seeped into the realms of social and

political action as in the campaigns of the Suffragettes, Labour Party

and Irish Nationalists. Basing her design on Walter Crane’s female

warrior, Britomart in 1900 (Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris),

Caroline Watts produced one of the seminal emblems of the

Women’s Suffrage movement for a demonstration in Manchester in

1908, followed by Sylvia Pankhurst’s 1912 designs, using motifs

from banners used at the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in her twentieth-

century crusade.745 There was no doubt that such images were

calculated both to inspire participants and to warn spectators of their

warlike, but righteous, intent. Concepts of chivalry were being

transferred from the soldier and the imperialist to the radical female

protester.746 Woodville’s heroic colonel in The Charge of the 21st

Lancers had become a combative Suffragette, evoking concepts of

martyrdom (as in All That Was Left of Them), sacrifice (as in the Roll

Call) and chivalric honour (as in Just Like Bobs).747 Nor, in the face

of its unsatisfactory outcome, had the Boer War killed imperialism.

Rather, imperialism, or at the very least a love of the empire with

Britain at its heart, was being renegotiated through renewed notions

of chivalry, pageant and spectacle. Memorials to those killed in the

Boer War included soldiers dressed in knightly armour, as at Clifton

743 However, Hichberger, as reported in Harrington, suggests that following the Boer War “Englishmen were reticent about war and nationalism”, Hichberger, 1987: 117; Harrington, 1993: 301. 744 Nicholson, 1979: 157. 745 O’Neill, 2008: 114. 746 Hart, 2013: 113. 747 Hart, 2013: 113.

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College.748 With the passage of time, even the Boer War began to be

viewed as a “gentleman’s war”, and one which afforded “a very

pleasant time for a young fellow” who could indulge in his love of

sport, while harbouring a romantic yearning for the glory and

excitement of war.749

Artists, too, were attracted by these picturesque notions. As Shelley

Cordulack has demonstrated, Victorian artists had been able to adapt

classical mythology to their works of social criticism.750 Just so, their

successors in the first decades of the twentieth century adapted

historical as well as mythological subjects to address modern

concerns in a manner which played into this enthusiasm for chivalry

and related pageantry.751 Ignoring the rejection of the narrative in art

by Whistler and his followers, artists such as Edwin Austin Abbey

(1852-1911) used traditional scenes from Shakespeare’s historical

plays to arrive at new interpretations relevant to a contemporary

audience, forcing that audience to engage in the drama and its moral

consequences, as for example in Abbey’s large canvas of The Play

Scene in Hamlet (1897) (fig.74). Just as Hamlet and Horatio are

focussing on the reaction of the King, so too are the viewers who are

invited to take sides in this pivotal scene, emphasising the two-way

process of art and theatre.752 Essentially a spectacle, a drama and a

moral issue, war offered a particularly apposite subject for history

paintings, but this had been tempered by the humiliation of the Boer

War, resulting in a less overtly militant approach to battle art. As the

established war artists retreated onto the safer ground of earlier, less

controversial conflicts such as the Napoleonic and English Civil

wars, so too, but with different intent, did Edwardian history

painters, adopting crusading images as the boundaries between

748 Girouard, 1981: 171; there were two proposals for the form of this memorial, one featuring a soldier in khaki, the other a knight in armour and it was the latter that prevailed. 749 Pakenham, 1979: 571; Girouard, 1981: 282. 750 Cordulack, 2003: 535-83. 751 Hart, 2013: 111. 752 Hart, 2013: 109.

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historical figures and contemporary social and political campaigners

merged. Historical, and specifically Shakespearean, iconography had

the advantage of making war seem attractive and romantic while

retaining the capacity to formulate cogent modern arguments. As an

example of contemporary meaning in history painting, consider

Abbey’s The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (1900)

(Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). Here Imogen Hart has drawn

attention to the manner in which Eleanor is shamed through public

spectacle as she is exhibited in the streets before a crowd of men in a

scene from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, much as Suffragettes

were vilified for their high profile demonstrations in their campaign

for the vote.753 Similarly, Lady Anne in Richard, Duke of Gloucester,

and the Lady Anne (1896) (Yale University Art Gallery) is subjected

to the critical gaze of the crowd as she is dragged along

unceremoniously by her future husband. Paradoxically, it was the

ostensibly non-military subjects which had become more conflictual.

The experience of soldiers in action, the bodily crush and confusion

had been replaced by the massed spectator crowd censoriously

passing judgment on moral issues, and I suggest it would not be too

fanciful to regard this criticism as an oblique reference to the conduct

of the war in South Africa. In 1901, Byam Shaw had highlighted the

pain of loss experienced by the women left behind to grieve in his

painting, The Boer War, allowing the “powerful contrast between the

myth and reality to speak for itself,” a myth many had accepted in

1899 only to feel the private and collective agony of bereavement.754

When, after the war, the Royal Commission on the War in South

Africa was being set up, Britain was paying off Boer debts, alongside

its own heavy financial outlay, and Milner was busy importing his

highly unpopular Chinese labour, it was clear there were awkward

questions to be asked. But these were not questions that traditional

753 Hart, 2013: 116. 754 Quotation cited in Cordulack, 2003: 540; see also Barringer, 2000: 66 who refers to Byam Shaw engaging “with key social and ideological issues of his era”.

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war artists were asking; indeed their critical silence was deafening.

Noted for her sympathy to the cause of women, whilst not an active

suffragist, Butler made no artistic comment, for example, on the

plight of women and children in the concentration camps or farm

burnings, as she had previously with her painting Evicted.755 This is

somewhat surprising, given that as Krebs has pointed out the “Great

British Public could agonise about the death rates and the conditions

in the camps without being seen to criticise the generals, the soldiers

or the Government’s war policy”.756 Instead, it was Abbey’s 1901

illustration of the trial of Anne Hutchinson in seventeenth-century

America (fig.75) which provided a far more trenchant comment on

the progress of the war. Abbey portrays an erect, principled Anne

Hutchinson, hemmed in by her hunched-up, seated male prosecutors,

as they call her to account for her so-called heretical views, and in

the full expectation that her trial will lead to censure and punishment.

By the time of Abbey’s work, Hutchinson had become revered as

one of America’s pioneers of religious freedom, her moral courage in

upholding her beliefs becoming her lasting legacy. This was

produced at a time when the war had turned sour, the views of the

peace lobby were becoming more acceptable and Emily Hobhouse

was writing her eye-witness accounts. “What kind of man was John

Bull” asked Irish MP John Dillon, “that he had to lock up women as

a threat to his military?”757 The notion that Britain could be regarded

as upholding the rights of the downtrodden was severely dented and

in need of urgent repair. In choosing a scene from seventeenth-

century America, home of liberty and the Pilgrim Fathers, whose

descendants were themselves denying religious freedom to their

citizens, Abbey was drawing out unnerving analogies with much of

the politics behind the war in South Africa, where self-interest had

taken precedence over the rights of the native African population and

755 Butler was recorded in 1897 as a supporter of women’s suffrage, Cherry, 1993: 93; on the subject of women and concentration camps, see Krebs, 1992: 38-56. 756 Krebs, 1992: 42; not everyone was of this mind, but it is clear that the balance of public opinion had shifted from the earlier pro-war stance. 757 Cited in Krebs, 1992: 46.

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where Boer women and children were dying in their thousands in the

camps.

By contrast, Crofts’ more gentle outdoor paintings of the civil war in

England do not advance a moral argument and, as has been shown,

verge on the pastoral. Indeed, nowhere in the Boer War works of any

of the late-Victorian war artists, with the possible exception of

Woodville’s drawing of a (by him, fully justified) farm burning, is

there any hint of criticism as to how the war had been waged, as

these artists shifted their focus to less challenging issues. For Butler,

her time in South Africa had been a peculiarly painful experience,

which I suggest diverted her from dwelling on a social critique of the

campaign, however mild, or its effects. None of these other war

artists was known for social commentaries on war, concentrating

rather on the excitement and manly attributes of the men.758 With the

shift in public support for the war, they took the opportunity to

reinvigorate their genre by returning to earlier, more popular

campaigns, made even more so by the passage of time, rather than

adapting their styles to address the more problematic aspects of

contemporary politics within warfare.

A large section of the public meanwhile, in its heightened fascination

with nationalism, similarly retreated enthusiastically into the

comforting realm of historical pageant, crowding together en masse

as a kind of bulwark against the antipathy of the rest of the world and

revelling in their reinforced ideas of nationhood. As Deborah Sugg

Ryan has shown, these pageants, too, avoided controversial episodes

from recent history, choosing instead scenes from Roman times until

the eighteenth century, re-enacting battles of particular significance

in the country’s emergence as an international force.759 The pageant

was immensely popular with the newly leisured classes, which had

758 Charlton did comment on the plight of horses, for example, in Abandoned (1904) (location unknown), but not on that of humans. 759 Ryan, 2010: 56.

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not only the opportunity to watch, but to participate in these highly

visual productions, adapting from history paintings the model of the

tableau, enhanced by new and emerging photographic technologies.

Unlike battle painting, however, this was an invented tradition which

was not only fashionable but flexible and, along with the concept of

chivalry, was quickly adopted by radical groups, such as the

Suffragettes, for their own political ends, reaching out to a mass

audience in a way that had rarely been seen since the parading of the

Roll Call around the country in the 1870s.

With this upsurge in nationalism, portraits continued to be popular,

not only with the landed aristocracy, but also with the middle-class

and nouveau-riche, many choosing to be painted in regimental

finery. Men as well as women, in Tickner’s words were making

“spectacles” of themselves, frequently choosing to be portrayed in

full dress uniform, endorsing an enduring love of military splendour

and display.760 1899 had seen a retrospective exhibition of Van Dyck

at the Royal Academy, while Sargent continued to exhibit his society

portraits throughout the Edwardian period. Of these, the portrait of

Sir Frank Swettenham in 1904, (fig.76) in his immaculate, decorated,

white uniform exudes imperial arrogance as he lounges elegantly

against an exotic carpet, and epitomises the very essence of

privileged luxury and power, emphasising that “spectatorial lust”

which Coombs refers to as a “most serious factor in imperialism”.761

The severity of line in the 1898 portrait of Colonel Hamilton has

been replaced by an altogether more relaxed figure, confident in his

appearance and social position, Hamilton’s slightly anxious tilt of

head by a direct, almost supercilious gaze. Society portrait painters

played into press criticism and public nostalgia by reworking old and

accepted themes, while introducing a new elegant gloss reflecting the

Janus-like experience of the pre-war decades of the twentieth

century. This confident presentation, however, belied a more

760 Tickner, 1987: 81, referring here to the Suffragette campaign. 761 Coombs, 1987: 152.

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complex and conflicted Britain and one which, with the events of

1914, was about to implode.

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CHAPTER FIVE

“MANDARISM” VERSUS MODERNISM

If art be in truth the noble and inspiring thing our foremost statesmen annually assure us it is, it should be in service in time of war as well as in time of peace.762

With the outbreak of the First World War, the late-Victorian battle

artists immediately found themselves at a disadvantage. Already they

had been referred to by the Athenaeum as “old crocks”, left behind as

the younger artists rushed to war, and as such initially the only artists

able to exhibit as “official”.763 By the time of the first committee

appointment in 1916, Butler was nearly 70 years of age, Charlton 69,

Woodville, Wollen and Giles all 60 and all were identified with

works traditionally exhibited at the Royal Academy, works which

were condemned for being “second hand” and futile.764 As Frank

Rutter, writing in 1933 observed, “you did not speak of the Royal

Academy if you pretended to be interested in modern art”.765

Younger male artists had been able to enlist. Paul and John Nash

(1893-1946) and Charles Jagger (1885-1934) had chosen the Artists’

Rifles, and were joined by Lavery, the 58 year old society portrait

painter, (who, however, was soon given medical advice to return to

painting at home in view of his so-called advanced years).766 Other

artists served with the Royal Army Medical Corps or the Red Cross,

as for example, Nevinson, Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and his

brother Gilbert (1892-1979), or were employed in camouflage or

topographical work.767

762 Letter from William Rothenstein to the Times, 19 February 1916, cited in Harries, 1983: 4. 763 The Athenaeum, 5 December 1914, cited in Harrington, 1992: 47. 764 Harrington, 1992: 50, citing a review by Collins Baker of the 1915 Royal Academy exhibition. 765 Cited in Stevens, 1988: 12. 766 Harries, 1983: 2, though this did not prevent his recruitment by the BWMC. 767 Solomon Solomon (1860-1927) was commissioned to camouflage tanks; Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) (who also enlisted for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) designed camouflage for shipping.

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When the decision was made in 1918 by the British War Memorials

Committee to commemorate the war visually, it was specified that

only art painted by those who had witnessed the particular incident

would be accepted.768 There was to be no commissioning of

retrospective battle pictures; instead all art, it was declared, should be

of the moment, and would constitute a “national collection of war

pictures by artists of great ability”.769 This was a policy said to be

rigidly adhered to and as late as 1936 Butler’s painting described as

Saving the Guns at Loos was declined by the art section of the

Imperial War Museum on the grounds that “it does not come within

the scope of the Museum’s collection, which is devoted to works

painted by eye-witnesses”.770 Artists who did not have personal

experience of this war would not be considered, and many would not

be given the opportunity of acquiring that experience, even given, in

some cases, their very earnest wish to do so. What did it mean in any

event to paint from personal experience? Did it mean actual

engagement in combat, like Nash and Kennington? or was mere

observation sufficient? If so, did it suffice to witness a dressing-

station as in the case of Sargent or did it require the more intimate

knowledge gained through caring for the wounded as with Spencer

and Nevinson?

This chapter will explore the way in which the official war artist

schemes operated, largely to the exclusion of existing battle artists,

choosing rather to promote those allied with the new, the untried and

the more avant-garde. It will look at how the BWMC formulated and

applied their criteria for inclusion within the scheme. It will examine

the way in which those who were rejected or ignored were dealt with

and assess their failure to survive artistic recognition beyond 1918

768 This was later renamed the Pictorial Propaganda Committee before being placed under the control of the Imperial War Museum. The commissioned paintings were subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy as The Nation’s War Paintings in 1919-20, Malvern, 2004: 69-71. 769 Minutes BWMC, 2 March 1918, citing Lord Beaverbrook, Malvern, 2004: 210. 770 IWM: ART/WAI/172/2 (B), letter 5 February 1936 to M.Roche, jeweller, and probably refers to The London Irish at Loos.

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alongside more modernist works, and in the absence of such super

stardom as that enjoyed by Sargent. It will then consider the ways in

which official policy was modified when convenient and raise issues

affecting the legacy of those battle artists who were-and are still-

ignored into the twenty-first century. In particular it will trace the

development of Butler’s humanitarian approach, and whether this

was adopted and developed by the younger generation of war artists

in a trajectory linking battle art of the 1870s to that of the twentieth

century, before ending with a close comparison of Sargent’s official

war painting Gassed and Butler’s Roll Call and Balaclava.

The “Alleged Miracle” of World War One Official War Artist Schemes771 From the early days of the war, much official propaganda had been

dealt with covertly by a department known as Wellington House,

which under its director, Charles Masterman, recognised the impact

of visual propaganda.772 In the absence of sufficient suitable

photographic images, it was decided to use artists to capture scenes

which could be reproduced through publications such as the War

Pictorial, calendars, cigarette cards and similar widely circulated

ephemera.773 In 1916, Bone became the first commissioned artist,

followed by others who were generally dependant on personal

recommendation.774 Nevinson had already made his mark in this new

war with Returning to the Trenches (1914) (National Gallery of

Canada) and La Mitrailleuse (1915) (fig.77) as had Kennington with

his large scale painting on glass, The Kensingtons at Laventie. On the

back of favourable reviews, both were recruited.

771 Bennett, 1919: 347. 772 Malvern, 2004: 17-35. 773 Harries, 1983: 7; this was a monthly magazine with a circulation of approximately 750,000 copies worldwide, 110,000 in English, Malvern, 2004: 72. 774 For example, Francis Dodd, who was Bone’s brother-in-law, James McBey, recommended by Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, Lavery, portrait painter to the Royal Family in 1913 and married to an influential second wife; see Harries for further details of the Official War Artists.

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Alongside the disadvantage of her age, Butler had the additional

drawback of being a woman. This is not to say that all women were

excluded from war art work. Arnold Bennett, an influential member

of the BWMC, was given the task of compiling a list of subjects for

paintings on the Home Front.775 When the committee was

considering which artists should be invited to produce works for

posterity, Bennett was concerned to include works which were not

exclusively military in theme and which would offer opportunities

for the involvement of women and those reluctant to travel abroad.

Kemp-Welch, for example, already known for her paintings of

horses in the Boer War, was commissioned by the Women’s Work

Sub-Committee to paint a picture of the Remount Camp in Swindon

in 1919, while Anna Airey (1882-1964) was commissioned by both

the Imperial War Museum’s Ministry of Munitions Sub-Committee

and the Women’s Work Sub-Committee as well as the BWMC

between 1918 and 1919.776 Her paintings, though subsequently

rejected, were to represent “typical scenes” in four munitions

factories.777 In addition, in 1915 as part of a national propaganda

initiative, a recruitment poster was produced entitled Forward!

Forward to Victory, ENLIST NOW! (National Army Museum)

depicting a thrusting cavalry officer head on, and closely based on

Kemp-Welch’s painting of the same name. It is not difficult to see

significant similarities in this poster and Butler’s Scotland Forever!

even down to the title’s exclamation mark. Contrary to the policy of

direct observation of a painting’s subject-matter, photography was

also used to assist women artists by giving them truthful

775 Harries, 1983: 87; Beaverbrook had taken as his model the Canadian War Memorial Fund. 776 Lucy Kemp-Welch was commissioned by Lady Norman of the Women’s Work Sub-Committee, IWM: ART/WAI/037/5. Under pressure from Lady Norman, chair of the Women’s Work Sub-Committee, Kemp-Welch also offered her Royal Academy Painting, The Straw-Ride: Russley Park Remount Depot to the new museum when it remained unsold following the academy exhibition, IWM: ART/WAI/1037/5, 16 August 1920. Her 1917 painting, Forward the Guns, was purchased during the war by the Tate, Palmer, 2011: 12. 777 Palmer, 2011: 81.

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information.778 No women, however, were required or even invited

to travel abroad, although Olive Mudie-Cooke (1890-1925), who

went out as a nurse, was commissioned to provide representations of

the work of the Red Cross in France.779 Her watercolour, Burnt Out

Tank (1917) (fig.78), offers a dramatic representation of a wrecked

tank, perched perilously on the edge of an incline, and bears a

remarkable resemblance to Tanks (1916) (Imperial War Museum), a

popular and much-reproduced charcoal drawing by Bone,

acknowledging the new technological face of combat.780

There is no record of Butler ever having offered her services to the

committee, although she had travelled with her son Patrick to the

New Forest to “see an army under war conditions and have priceless

opportunities of studying ‘the real thing’”.781 As she watched the

men prepare for war she describes her mixed feelings, at one moment

discussing the “notes of the cheery pipes and fifes” and the

“beautiful sight” the Gordons made, especially as a breeze “blew the

khaki aprons aside and the revealed tartan kilts gave a welcome bit of

colour” which “touched up the drab most effectively”, the next

writing of “doomed legions” as “shadow-like [they] moved to and

fro”.782 Leaving Lyndhurst, she reflected that the experience would

“ever remain with [her] in a halo of physical and spiritual sunshine

seen through a mist of sadness”.783

Both Woodville and Giles are known to have asked for permission to

travel to the Front to paint. Woodville was particularly energetic in

promoting himself, writing in 1918 firstly to Lord Beaverbrook and

then to Alfred Yockney, who, with Bone, was responsible for the list

778 Deepwell, 2008: 15, who names both Isobel Codrington and Norah Neilson-Gray as having received this form of assistance. 779 Palmer, 2011: 83; Bone did suggest the names of several women artists, including Gwen John, Dora Carrington and Gwen Raverat, but none of these names was taken up by the BWMC, Harries, 1983: 90. 780 Harries, 1983: 78. 781 Butler, 1993: 253. 782 Butler, 1993: 254, 256. 783 Butler, 1993: 258.

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of subjects to be represented on the Western Front.784 Woodville’s

pleading letter to Yockney makes it clear that he is desperate to be

allowed to travel to the war zone I have heard from Mr E Goddard, the editor of the Illustrated London News, yesterday that he put in an application for me to go to France. It is absolute cruelty to deprive me from visiting and spending a while with an army fighting there, a privilege granted to others, considering that I have devoted a life time in depicting on papers and canvas these deeds of our glorious soldiers of the past and present. I don’t care in what capacity you send me there, either as a soldier or civilian, I naturally would prefer the first. I am a British subject by descent and birth and served for twenty-three years and held commissions in the Yeomanry and Engineer Volunteers my last appointment being in the [Torrington troops in the] Royal North Devon Hussars in which I commanded my Torrington troop. I speak French and German thoroughly having resided for years in both these Country’s (sic), having also travelled extensively in the East, India and European Turkey, my first campaign being in that country. I also sketch, draw and paint a little. Trusting that you may earn my lasting gratitude in obtaining a chance for me to see our men at the front before this War finishes, so that I can gain local colour as a battle painter. 785

The reply was not positive. Woodville’s letter was considered at a

committee meeting after which he was told that “it was not found

possible for you to be placed on the limited list of artists at work for

the Ministry. You will understand that there are a great many

difficulties in the way”.786 No indication of the difficulties is

recorded, and, even with Goddard’s support, the minutes of the

committee meeting state simply that his “application was negatived”.

Instead Woodville was advised that “[w]ith your other qualifications

it might be possible, perhaps, for the War Office to utilize your

services”.787 Woodville, in his letter to Beaverbrook, had already

784 IWM: ART/WAI/483/11: 127-28, 123-25; see also Harries, 1983: 87. 785 IWM: ART/WAI/483/11: 123-25; Woodville’s father was in fact American. In his letter to Beaverbook, Woodville had written that it was “his greatest wish to be able to go to the front and see the realities of this war”, IWM: ART/WAI/483/11: 127. 786 IWM: ART/WAI/483/11: 122. 787 IWM: First World War Artists Archive: 493/12, minutes 6 November 1918; IWM: ART/WAI/483/11, letter of 7 November 1918.

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explained how it had been the War Office which had initially

referred him on.788

Giles fared no better. In a memo it is recorded that “Major G.D.Giles

called today. He is anxious to be employed by us as an artist at the

Front-if possible for the duration of the war. He would be quite

willing to work under our usual conditions for artists.” Attached to

the memo are particulars of his career as listed in Who’s Who,

outlining his education at public school and Sandhurst, and service in

the army from 1875 in India, Afghanistan and Egypt. Although like

Sargent, Giles had studied under Carolus-Duran, and, unlike Sargent,

had experienced service on the front line as an army officer, this

response, too, was not encouraging.789 He was told bluntly that

“there is no prospect at present that we shall be able to have the

advantage of your services in this way”.790 Slightly more hopeful

was the comment that Giles’ “name has been placed on our list of

artists who wish to be employed by the Government and we will of

course let you know when any opportunity arises”.791 No such

contact was ever made.792

Given the description by M. and S. Harries of the “extraordinarily

catholic” lists produced by Bone and the unbiased approach of the

Committee, which “chose virtually every school” from which to

draw their artists, how are we to account for the omission of these

proven battle artists, some of whom are virtually throwing

788 IWM: ART/WAI/483/11:126. 789 Carolus-Duran was much praised and criticised for painting directly onto canvas, overlooking “drawing for tone and color” (sic), a characteristic helpful to those war artists who also produced work for the illustrated press according to Julian Alden Weir, cited in Fairbrother, 1994: 13. 790 IWM: ART/WAI/483/11, undated; after the Boer War Giles appears to have stopped exhibiting publicly. 791 IWM: ART/WAI/483/11, letter 6 April 1918. 792 Malvern records that Giles, described as “war correspondent” was rejected by the Ministry, but omits any reference to Woodville, Malvern, 2004: 191. There is no record that Wollen offered his services or was approached by the committee though he continued to paint. See p.228 for a twentieth-century curatorial view of his work.

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themselves at Yockney’s feet?793 Neither Woodville nor Giles could

be accused of not wishing to travel out to the Front, and both had

previously seen service either as reservist or professional soldier.

Although most of the male and female “artists who received

women’s section commissions were drawn from academic circles”

there is similarly no evidence of Butler having been approached to

produce a painting from the Home Front.794 One possible explanation

is the emphasis the sub-committee placed on the portrayal of women,

especially carrying out traditional male roles, but also frequently as

nurses, whereas Butler was known mainly, though not exclusively,

for her depiction of men in or near the theatre of war and not of

women in supporting roles on the domestic front.795 While the

BWMC made it clear they would not accept retrospective battle

paintings, on the evidence of her sketches of troops in the New

Forest, she would have been equally as well qualified as Kemp-

Welch, and had already indicated her intention to put all her

“attention and energy to this stupendous war”.796

Nor in spite of Bennett’s strongly held view that the “reactionary

mass of RA and ARA muck” should be disqualified, were those

exhibiting at the Royal Academy excluded.797 In a letter to Thomas

Bodkin, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, he wrote that he

had “succeeded in turning down all RA painters, except Clausen”

adding “[s]ome feat, believe me! Yes, I have turned down even the

inevitable Brangwyn.”798 Nevertheless, Sargent was commissioned

to paint what Malvern has referred to as a “supersize” picture, while

793 Harries, 1983: 88. 794 Deepwell, 2008: 20; Lavery, apparently, received the largest portion of the women’s section budget. 795 Deepwell, 2008: 14; for example, Butler’s self-portrait, Evicted, and To the Front: French Cavalry leaving a Breton City on the Declaration of War (1888-89) (private collection). 796 Butler also “went daily to watch the troops drilling in the parks” on her return to London, Butler, 1983: 258-59. 797 Harries, 1983: 88. 798 Cited in Horner, 2014: 29; Frank Brangwyn (1867-19) was nevertheless heavily involved in war posters and was selected by P.G.Konody to work for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Horner, 2014: 6.

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Charles Sims (1873-1928), along with Clausen, was invited to

contribute a “Uccello”–sized painting for a proposed memorial

gallery, all three, well-known members of the Royal Academy.799 At

the same time, members of the New English Art Club (NEAC), Post-

Impressionists and Fauvists together with students and staff from the

Slade, were considered, albeit most had never previously painted war

subjects..800 Although M. and S. Harries consider how intriguing it

would be to know more about those artists who were not selected,

the names they mention belong to the Bloomsbury and Camden

Town sets, namely, Fry and Sickert, and there is no reference to the

artists under discussion here.801 Age may well have been a

contributing factor, but it cannot be said to have been definitive,

looking at those artists selected to provide works for the “art

memorial” suggested by Robert Ross. Under this scheme invitations

were handed out to Clausen, then 66, Sargent, 62, Philip Wilson

Steer (1860-1942), 58 and Henry Tonks (1862-1937), 56.802 These

are remarkably close to the ages of Woodville, Wollen and Giles in

particular, born 1856 and 1857 respectively.

One possible explanation for their omission is that the names of these

late-Victorian battle artists were perceived to be so inextricably

linked with their earlier failure to paint from reality and to rely

strongly on their imagination, however carefully based on personal

research, that the committee found it inconceivable to think of them

in any other way. As Malvern has observed, their work was seen as

populist and lacking in authenticity, especially when viewed

alongside the work of the more avant-garde.803 Woodville was

known for dramatising sketches sent in from “Specials” in his work

for the illustrated press, while Butler, though well-travelled, had

commented that if she had ever personally seen an actual battlefield, 799 Malvern, 2004: 178-79. 800 Harries, 1983: 88. 801 Harries, 1983: 89-90; in relation to Fry, they quote the committee minutes, “[t]he attainments of Mr Fry were discussed but no recommendations were made”. 802 See Harries, 1983: 91-93 for further details of the memorial scheme. 803 Malvern, 2004: 86.

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her career as a military painter would have come to an end.804 These

artists may have withdrawn temporarily from contemporary issues

following the Boer War but in doing so they were in sympathy with

the vast majority of the British public. I suggest these are hardly

sufficient reasons for their exclusion, especially given the

willingness of Woodville and Giles to obtain first-hand experience,

the committee’s awareness that Giles was a British Army officer, and

Butler’s period with the army at the outset of the war, for it is clear

that the committee had it in its power to bypass these difficulties

should it have so chosen. It is also not the case that selection by the

BWMC guaranteed purchase, for the committee was not slow to

reject paintings they felt fell short of their required standard.805

Ironically, as Brian Jones has cogently demonstrated as recently as

2007, official artists, too, were not immune from working up

paintings from photography rather than relying on personal

observation as inspiration for their work, though whether this was

widely known at the time is uncertain.806 In particular, Jones draws

attention to the correspondence between Nevinson’s 1915 painting

La Mitrailleuse and an article in the Sphere dated 20 November

1915, entitled ‘Trenches: The Disappearance of the Old French Cap’,

appropriately illustrated with four images of the new style of

uniform, one with the caption “A French Maxim Gun Detachment in

Action near Souchez”. He points out that the date of the article

indicates strongly that Nevinson would have had it in mind as he

created his painting, citing this as “a clear example of Nevinson

patching over his visual memory with the most current press

imagery”.807 Jones also draws attention to the similarity between La

Mitrailleuse and Sickert’s painting, The Soldiers of King Alfred the

Ready (1914) (Sheffield City Art Gallery), remarking on the “skilful

804 The Times, 4 October 1933. 805 For example, Anna Airey and, surprisingly, given Bennett’s comments, Brangwyn, Malvern, 2004: 187, 183. 806 Jones, 2007: 134-81. 807 Jones, 2007: 142.

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synthesis of tabloid newspaper shots of the “Armoured Man” with a

photo-by-proxy source in Sickert”.808 On this analysis, Nevinson’s

work falls far short of the requirement for it to be drawn from

personal experience. Although Jones only refers in his article to

Nevinson, similar observations have been made of work by both

John and Sargent, giving rise to speculation of a wider practice.809 It

should not be overlooked that Butler, too, would have had access to

press reports to inform her work, added to which she took care to

obtain reportage from eye-witnesses to events at the Front.810

One aspect of the Great War which was new in military campaigns

was the dependence on technology and the early recognition that

cavalry was less than useless against machine guns and, later, tanks.

Whatever the inspiration, Nevinson had already highlighted the new

tenor of war in 1915 with La Mitrailleuse, in its sharp-edged

representation of a rapid firing volley gun manned by robotic

operatives, and by 1918 very few official artists were exhibiting

paintings featuring horses in the thick of battle. Such as there were,

generally confined themselves to representing horses as transport for

ammunition or the wounded, as in Spencer’s Travoys Arriving with

Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September,

1916 (fig.79), or highlighting the adverse effects of war on the

animal, as in A Case of Mustard-Gas Poisoning (1914-18) (Imperial

War Museum) by Edwin Noble (1876-1941), replacing the dramatic

cavalry charges of the nineteenth century.811 Nevertheless, both

Kemp-Welch and Alfred Munnings (1878-1959), who was

approached by the BWMC to produce a series of cavalry paintings

along the lines of the one he had painted for the Canadian memorial

808 Jones, 2007: 142. 809 Harries, 1983: 96-97, who show that John’s only war painting, Fraternity (1918) (Imperial War Museum) was copied from a photograph in the Daily Mail, entitled “A Fag after a Fight”; see also Fox, 2009: 126. 810 Harris and Nochlin write that “one suspects the possible use of photographs” in Butler’s work but without providing any evidence, Harris and Nochlin, 1976: 249. 811 William Roberts also represented horses in his painting, ‘Feeds Round’: Stable-time in the Wagon-lines, France (1922) (Imperial War Museum) again showing horses away from the Front.

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scheme, were commissioned, though in the event injury prevented

Munnings from delivering.812 Neither artist could be described as

being especially innovative in their “khaki-clad versions of hunt

meetings”.813 What is clear from this, is that horse painters as such

were not on the Committee’s exclusion list.

By the time the Committee was considering the artistic legacy of the

war, it was evident that set-piece battles, such as at Quatre Bras,

Waterloo or Balaclava were irrelevant. The experiences of the

soldiers at the Front told stories of the extreme conditions they had to

endure. 1917 was the year of the Third Battle of Ypres

(Passchendaele) when for the whole of August the rain fell

continuously leaving in its wake “a curious kind of sucking mud” so

“tenacious” that the Highlanders were obliged to abandon their kilts

on account of the additional weight in the pleats.814 Although the

cavalry was used throughout the war, the method of deployment

changed as heavy gun fire, tanks and mud intervened. Just as they

had adapted to the use of khaki, battle painters again had to adapt to

these new circumstances. Woodville and Butler too, continued to

paint scenes from the First World War, Butler for her solo

exhibitions and Woodville for the illustrated press. In addition

Woodville painted works in oil such as Return to Mons (fig.80), a

restrained work completed after the Armistice, and reminiscent of the

Roll Call in its flat, horizontal composition.815 Far from his earlier

focus on the drama of war, memories of death and privation are

evoked here by his use of sombre colouring, even in the moment of

triumphal re-entry. Interestingly, though, as has already been seen

from the use of Butler’s Scotland Forever!, German artists appear to

have continued to produce posters with images of cavalry charges

throughout the war, from a depiction of Crown Prince William 812 Harries, 1983: 102; one canvas which Munnings did offer the committee in 1919 was rejected, Malvern, 2004: 190. 813 Peters Corbett, 1997: 193, in his description of the work of Munnings. 814 Podcast 31, IWM: WW1 Lives, accessed 14/1/14. 815 This painting is also known as Re-entry into Mons and Entry of the 5th Lancers into Mons.

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leading the charge in 1914 for Der Deutsche Kriegsbilderbogen to a

poster advertising an exhibition of war loot in 1917 featuring a single

cavalry officer of the Death’s Head Hussars.816

Butler and the Politics of Inclusion

In some way every picture or piece of sculpture representing an incident of warfare may be regarded as a war memorial provided it belongs to the time with which it deals and expresses the spirit of that time.817

Given the inclusion of horse painters, older artists, women artists and

those who remained at home, this omission of these late-Victorian

battle artists calls into question the so-called catholic nature of the

selection process. The Graphic, for one, did not see it that way,

arguing that “[i]n the matter of pictorial artists, they have been

‘officially’ chosen from what may be called the esoteric schools, or,

at any rate, from the ranks of artists who appeal mainly to art

connoisseurs”.818 Rather than relying on the perception of these

official artists, the Graphic produced its own analysis, highlighting

the different modes of representation from photography, through

representational work to the more avant-garde, implying that each

had its place in the ‘Battle of the War Artists’.819 Public perception

and taste and the views of the BWMC, as the article demonstrates,

were not united, and the paper distanced itself from the last of these

categories. As for photography, a reporter for the Graphic recorded

that he “saw the devil’s work with [his] own eyes. It was far beyond

the reach of a camera.” 820

Writing for the New Statesman, Arnold Bennett confirmed the

committee’s “total absence of prejudice against youth”, “total

absence of prejudice in favour of age” and “total absence of

816 IWM: ART/IWM/PST: 1402; IWM: ART/IWM/PST: 5297. 817 Konody, 1919: 6. 818 The Graphic, 11 May 1918, cited by Malvern, 2004: 39. 819 The title of the article’s heading. 820 The Graphic, 31 October 1914: 620 cited in Fox, 2009: 121.

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prejudice in favour of success” together with a “somewhat strong

“down” on mandarism in any form”.821 Instead, he reported, in a

rather cavalier manner, echoing Konody’s “relentless war against all

academic conventions”, that the committee was “on velvet”, that “its

members had nothing to lose” and that it “quite blithely gave

important commissions to untried boys”, robustly situating the

committee in the camp of male youth against female age, avant-

garde against traditional, rejecting a more all-embracing approach,

characteristic of the Edwardian era.822

I suggest that the greatest impediment to the inclusion of the “old

guard” in the official war artists’ schemes was their image either as

elderly and stale mandarins, or as ‘mere’ illustrators, together with a

belief by the committee in their incapacity to adapt. In A Survey of

the Work of the Official War Artists and Others, William Orpen,

(1878-1931) himself selected by the committee, wrote that “the

failure of the older artists to grapple with the situation [of a new

technological war] was neither surprising nor shameful. They did not

possess the requisite experience.” Orpen intimated that age precluded

them, although several, as we have seen, were desperate for that

experience only to have it denied, while their ages were not that

dissimilar from some of those artists selected.823 Reference was made

approvingly and without irony to the appointment of Lavery, born in

1857, who was “enlisted, so to speak, for ‘home service’ and able to

paint without crossing the seas”. Orpen selected for especial praise

Nevinson and Kennington as being “truer to the spirit of the time”,

Nevinson for highlighting “the pain and the suffering, and above all,

the relative insignificance of the individual pawn in this mighty war-

game” and Kennington for his “stately presentation of human

821 Bennett, 1919: 348. 822 Konody, 1917: 14 for first quotation; other quotations are from Bennett, 1919: 348 whose approach differed markedly from that adopted in the Second World War, with its “preference for artists from a middle ground, neither too influenced by European Modernism nor too conservative”, Powers, 2013: 153-5, citing Kenneth Clarke. 823 Orpen, 1930? [sic]: 610, 627-28.

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endurance, of the quiet heroism of the rank and file”.824

Kennington’s The Kensingtons at Laventie was, in his view, striking

for representing “the deadliest enemy”, “the piercing cold, which

seems to pervade the whole picture”. At no time did he acknowledge

any correspondence between either of these artists and Butler’s

earlier paintings, in particular the desolate snowy scene of the Roll

Call referring rather to the “outworn conventions of the older

artists”, whilst omitting any analysis of their works.825

There is no indication that the committee ever considered advising

this cohort of battle painters how they could comply with its artistic

requirements and all responses to queries were brief in the extreme.

Moreover, in its determination to represent the war faithfully, the

committee failed to consider the more basic issue as to where the

truth lay, and to ask whether, as with beauty, it might not lie in the

eye of the beholder.826 Far from being eclectic, the committee, in this

sense at least, was prescriptive, ignoring the longevity of many of the

images inspired by Butler and taken up by her contemporaries. I

would suggest that this view still obtains, for as recently as July 2014

a new exhibition of war art at the Imperial War Museum (London)

featured The Second Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light

Infantry Defeating the Prussian Guard at Nonne Bosschen (1915)

(The Royal Green Jackets Rifles Museum, Winchester) by Wollen

with the dismissive caption, “this apparent realism and his

meticulous attention to detail lent a spurious authenticity to his work

and affirmed the traditional values to which he ascribed.”827 The

824 Orpen, 1930? [sic]: 620. 825 Orpen, 1930? (sic]: 622. He also praises Henry Lamb (1883-1960), for his work Advanced Dressing Station on the Struma, 1916 (1921) (Manchester City Galleries) showing the “boredom and dreariness of the men who are waiting for unutterable things to happen” again omitting any reference to Butler’s Dawn of Waterloo with its mixed emotions before battle, Orpen, 1930? [sic]: 629. 826 This has already been touched upon in chapter two (p.105) under a consideration of Woodville’s paintings, one of which an ex-soldier swore coincided exactly with his own experiences. 827 ‘Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War’, July 2014 to March 2015 ignoring the fact that Wollen is here depicting an event which took place on 11 November 1914 in the very early days of the war.

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century which had started with an increase of battle-themed exhibits

at the Royal Academy was, even before the end of the First World

War, already proving to be a difficult arena for these late-Victorian

battle painters as they increasingly struggled to exhibit their works

and obtain commissions, leading many of them to concentrate more

on their drawings for the press in preference to their more academic

works. In order to develop these issues further, this next section will

consider Sargent’s Gassed alongside Butler’s paintings, the Roll Call

and Balaclava.

Sargent’s “Gassed”

In his article ‘On War Memorials’ in 1919 Konody wrote that the

“tactical” battle picture had been replaced by a “changed mental

attitude” whereby the modern war painter was “no longer concerned

with hero worship and the glorification of the victorious army

leader”, arguing that his “pictures form not so much a war memorial

as a plea for universal peace”.828 Modern warfare, he continued, was

concerned with the visually “dingy and drab”, concentrating rather

on the sufferings of the common soldier.829 In writing this, Konody,

like Orpen, appears to have completely overlooked the radical

approach of Butler in the 1870s to 1890s, when she was being

praised for highlighting the plight of the common troops, for

avoiding the glorification of war and being courted by the Peace

Society.830 Instead, he singled out Goya and Vassily Vereschtschagin

(1842-1904), Butler’s Russian contemporary, whose “heart went out

to the obedient pawns in the great war game”.831 Ironically, in 1874,

Butler, notwithstanding her emphasis on individual suffering, had

been praised for her “thoroughly English” depiction of war with “no

828 Konody, 1919: 13-14. 829 Konody, 1919: 13. 830 Meynell, 1898: 31. In this Konody was followed by CRW Nevinson who claimed to be “the first artist to paint war pictures without pageantry, without glory, and without the over-coloured heroic that had made up the tradition of all war paintings up to this time”. Nevinson, 1937: 87-88. 831 Konody, 1919: 14.

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French theatrical glory, no Russian piling-up of horrors”.832 For

someone concerned with a nation’s autobiography through art, and of

“the wars that play so dominant a part on the history of the nations”,

Konody’s omission is striking.833 In this section I aim to show how

this “changed mental attitude” had already found its way into British

battle art well before the First World War.

In Jongwoo Jeremy Kim’s analysis of Gassed, he traces similarities

in the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “sightless fools” in Der

Blinden (fig.81) painted in 1568, arguing that although Sargent did

not paint a pit for the soldiers to fall into like the blind men

represented by Brueghel, (1525-69), “no viewer could escape the

crushing realization that the old world order collapsed along with the

heroism of the Empire”.834 Just as Charlton’s horsemen are out of

control, charging towards their destruction as they attempt to cross

the flooded Aisne, Kim suggests that Sargent’s representation of loss

of vision is a peculiarly apt criticism on the progress of the war. Der

Blinden does indeed show a procession, or perhaps, progress, of

blind men, but they are fewer in number (only six), wear no

bandages and they are not soldiers or obviously victims of war.

Brueghel’s painting, rather, is a social commentary on life in the

Netherlands at a time when incapacity led to great impoverishment

of life. The cartoonist Michael Rowson, in his essay on Otto Dix’s

series Der Krieg (1924) (National Gallery of Australia), made the

same comparison between Gassed and Der Blinden, with no

reference to Butler, but instead referencing Burne-Jones’ languid

processions of women, while Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond

follow Richard Dorment’s suggestion that Auguste Rodin’s Burghers

of Calais (1889) (Musée Rodin, Paris) was a source of inspiration.835

832 The Spectator, 9 May 1874. 833 Konody, 1919: 5; Konody is basing his analysis on Ruskin’s statement that “[g]reat nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts”, the most important of which is the book of art. 834 Kim, 2012: 142. 835 Broadcast on Radio Three on 25 June 2014 at 10.45 pm in ‘The Essay: Minds at War-Der Krieg’, as part of the BBC’s World War One commemorations;

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Similarly, Shaw overlooks Butler, writing that “a century would

pass” following such works as the 1821 Illustrations of the Great

Operations of Surgery (Army Services Medical Museum and

Wellcome Library, London) of Charles Bell (1774-1842) “before

official war artists of the order of John Singer Sargent and Henry

Tonks would present such scenes to the gallery-going public”.836

While Tonks and Bell share many similarities in their clinical

approach to injuries, it is more difficult to see how Sargent’s painting

relates to the medical works of either.

Butler’s Roll Call is in many ways far nearer to Gassed than either

Brueghel or Rodin, even though it merits no mention by Kim,

Rowson or Shaw, in spite of the similar format and although I have

found no reference to Sargent viewing the Roll Call I suggest it is

highly likely that he did. In both representations we see ordinary

soldiers who have experienced trauma and injury, linked to each

other across the canvas in what Das has referred to as a “tactile

continuum”.837 They are all dressed soberly, Butler’s guards in black,

Sargent’s troops in khaki. Each painting features a principal figure,

Butler’s sergeant taking the count of dead and injured, Sargent’s

orderly guiding them to the dressing station. Both use a horizontal

composition, akin to a classical frieze. Both show the dead, injured

and dying. But there the similarity ends, for I argue that of the two,

Butler’s painting is the more uncompromising, nearer to Konody’s

identification of the “dingy and drab”. It is altogether darker in tone,

with the opaque black of the greatcoats, as against the light,

yellowish khaki chosen by Sargent. Her soldiers are propping each

other up in a desolate snowy landscape with vultures circling

overhead. For them there is no comfort of a dressing station or the

promise of life ahead as indicated in Sargent’s background football

match. These are men who are many miles and many weeks from Kilmurray and Ormond, 1998: 265, who also mention Lord Leighton’s Daphnephoria (1874-76) (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool). 836 Shaw, 2013: 183; like Tonks, Bell was both a surgeon and an artist. 837 Das, 2008: 1.

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home, facing starvation, disease and cold in addition to the prospect

of further military engagement. They clearly show both

psychological and physical injury, some barely able to stand unaided,

others wearing slings or bandages on their limbs and heads, one face

down in the snow.

Balaclava goes further, with its graphic and full frontal presentation

of post-traumatic stress syndrome, bloodied hands, faces, chests,

horses, coupled with complete mental and physical exhaustion,

linked across the canvas by the supporting hands of fellow soldiers.

Compare this with E.M.Forster’s account of Sargent’s “golden-

haired Apollos” seen in profile only and “with bandages over their

eyes,” against a background which as Malvern comments is

“suffused in the warm glow of sunset” completing “the myth of

redemption”.838 These gassed men all form a line of upright, well-fed

soldiers, unmarked save for their cleanly bandaged eyes; the action

of one of the soldiers raising his leg to mount the duckboard imputes

the motion of a dance, referencing classical figures around an urn,

emphasising the frieze-like quality of Sargent’s format.

Das opens his book Touch and Intimacy in First World War

Literature with a telling description of Gassed where the “pinkish

glow of the setting sun [. . .] holds the soldiers, and stills them in our

minds in a moment of numbed serenity”.839 Although Sargent had

witnessed the “chokings and coughing of gassed men, which was a

nightmare”, Das observes that, notwithstanding clear references to

Brueghel’s “more macabre” representation, “such horrors are largely

absent in the painting”, which exudes a more peaceful, dreamlike

quality.840 In their place are “emollient contours”, “blond and

838 E.M.Forster in his 1925 essay ‘Me, Them and You’, cited in Fairbrother, 1994: 140; Malvern, 2004: 105. 839 Das, 2008: 4. 840 Das, 2008: 3-4, citing Sargent’s letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner; see also Gough, 2010: 199 (f/n 78).

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athletic” men and a “strangely tranquil” sky.841 As Trevor

Fairbrother has commented, although Sargent illustrated suffering

and compassion, he “chose a spectacle that would satisfy his pictorial

needs”, and there is no suggestion in his work of the ugly effects of

gassing, such as inflammation, pus, blisters, severe burns, coughing,

choking or genital mutilation, the total emasculated experience

referred to by C.E.Montague in British Artists at the Front.842

Instead, Sargent privileged the sensuous shared experience of a

masculine community, with what Das has referred to as the

“homoerotic undertones of war” familiar to a society artist who

“often did nude studies of working-class men for pleasure”.843 His

procession avoids the physical and psychological examination of the

Roll Call through its oblique format and pristine facial bandaging. As

early as 1901, the Athenaeum was referring to Sargent’s

“indifference, even in paint to the manner of expression”, and here it

is neatly sidestepped altogether.844 Vera Brittain, writing to her

mother from France, described gas victims quite differently as “poor

things all burnt and all blistered all over with great suppurating

blisters, with blind eyes [. . .] all sticky and stuck together and

always fighting for breath”.845 In Kim’s analysis, Gassed was not

intended to be a faithful picture of the effects of war; instead, in his

ironic choice of golden yellow and soft pastels, and the jarring

juxtaposition of a football match, Sargent is said to have inverted

truth to produce an “easy contentment” among the wounded, each

one of them neatly and well dressed.846

When considering Gassed, Malvern, too, makes comparisons, not

with Brueghel, but with the traditional layout or “stock” adopted by

841 Das, 2008: 3-4. 842 Fairbrother, 1994: 131; one soldier does lean away from the front as if to vomit; Montague et al, vol. 111(1918), “[o]ne does not see with the eyes alone, but with the brains and nerves too”, cited in Fox, 2009: 122. 843 Das, 2008: 4; see also Michael Hatt’s essay ‘Uranian Imperialism: Boys and Empire in Edwardian England’, 2007: 153-68. 844 The Athenaeum, 8 June, 1901: 732. 845 Brittain, 1933: 395, letter 5 December 1917. 846 Kim, 2012: 142-47.

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Christopher Prendergast in his analysis of La Bataille d’Eylau,

(1808) (The Louvre, Paris) by Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), in

which he refers to the foreground (sufferers), middle-ground

(redeemer) and distance (salvation).847 Following this, she argues

that Sargent has offered a picture of salvation through suffering, a

picture which betokens heroism and the reassurance of recovery. I

depart from both Kim and Malvern in that although it is certainly the

case that the soldiers are bathed in a golden light, they show little

sign of suffering.848 I suggest, rather, that Sargent is content to use a

traditional mimetic formula here, verging on the classical, to

represent war, a formula which signals the pity of war but not the

horror, the pain or mutilation.849 Prior to 1918, he had little personal

experience of war, less in fact than Butler, and such as he had,

derived from his portraits of military men (and others) in their

regimentals, followed by his short excursion to France in July 1918

with Tonks.850 Among his other war work, his watercolour A

Crashed Airplane (1918) (fig.82) makes scant reference to conflict in

the middle of what might be construed as a peaceful harvest scene,

against a background of distant posts suggestive of grave-markers,

and is less ominous in its oblique reference to war than Simpson’s

1857 Summer in the Crimea (fig.19).

There is no doubt, though, that Sargent did witness men suffering

from a gas attack, an image which presented itself to him as

appropriate for representation of war, abandoning his original brief to

highlight Anglo-American cooperation for this “harrowing sight, a

847 Malvern, 2004: 105; Malvern’s analysis is also considered by Kim who, he writes, underestimates the significance of loss of vision, Kim, 2012: 148. 848 Kim argues that the soldiers were at peace as they were already dead and represent symbols of the lost Empire, Kim, 2012: 144. 849 Das, 2008: 5, comments that Sargent “distils the pity of war into a moment of blindness and touch”. 850 Sargent was accorded privileged status, staying with Earl Haig before joining the Guards Division, Das, 2008: 3.

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field full of gassed and blindfolded men”.851 Sargent’s companion,

Tonks, elaborated the scene in his letter to Yockney Gassed cases kept coming in lead along in parties of about six just as Sargent has depicted them, by an orderly. They sat or lay down on the grass, there must have been several hundred, evidently suffering a great deal, chiefly, I fancy, from their eyes which were covered up by a piece of lint.852

Rowson comments that it is hard to imagine that such a painting

could have been produced by the losing side in the conflict.853 The

effect is too gentle, dreamlike and forgiving. What I am suggesting is

that it was only on his return at the end of hostilities in the comfort of

his studio, that Sargent reworked his idea using models for soldiers,

much in the same way as with his portraiture, and which enabled him

to aestheticise his experiences.854 According to Fox, like Nevinson

and John, Sargent, too, was aided by photography, supplementing his

personal experience of the dressing station, and in the process

making it more publicly accessible.855

While the BWMC had clearly been keen to enlist Sargent as an

official war artist, to the extent of obtaining prime ministerial

encouragement to contribute “to a series of immortal works”, their

motivation was two-fold.856 In a letter dated February 1917, Tonks

was told of “a scheme of pictorial propaganda” and asked for his

cooperation.857 By March 1919, the press was reporting that Gassed,

too, was originally intended for propaganda purposes in foreign

countries, but that the armistice was declared before it could be

851 Bone to Yockney, 5 November 1918, IWM: ART/WAI/312, ART DOC 1; Sargent writing to Evans Charteris on 11 September 1918, cited by Gough, 2010: 199; as recently as 2014, Paul Moorhouse, curator of Twentieth Century Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery was describing Gassed in similar terms as “this harrowing image”, Moorhouse, 2014: 140. 852 Letter Tonks to Yockney, 19 March 1920, IWM: ART/312. 853 Broadcast at 10.45 pm on 25 June 2014 on Radio Three as part of the BBC’s World War One commemorations. 854 See Malvern, 2004: 107 and Fairbrother, 1994: 131 for further discussion on Sargent and his technique. 855 Fox, 2009: 126. 856 Gough, 2010: 198 and f/n 74. 857 Letter, 20 February 1917, Yockney to Tonks, IWM: ART/WAI/312. ART DOC 1.

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used.858 Nevertheless, such a brief may well have influenced Sargent

in his manner of presenting allied troops, by side-stepping the more

horrific. As Malvern has observed, the BWMC was “drawing up a

canon of significant artists” who would do justice to the “scope and

depth of British art” at this momentous point in history.859 The

concern was that Sargent in particular would produce a painting

signifying the grandeur of both the war and their scheme of

commemoration.860 That a committee concerned with eye-witness

observation should also consider the element of grandeur in war

might seem strange and at odds with Konody’s expressed views and

I argue that it was more concerned with engaging an artist of

Sargent’s stature than with exhibiting a “changed mental attitude”.861

Yockney wrote in a memo “that Mr Sargent is a very distinguished

man and everything possible should be done for him”.862 Much had

been invested in his recruitment, and unlike both John and Orpen, he

had delivered on his commission. It is unthinkable that his

contribution would be rejected. Nevertheless, Sargent, for all his

“fizz and crackle”, though prepared to be immortalised through a

supersize war scene, was sufficiently mindful both of the public

reaction at home and abroad, presenting soldiers in such a way as to

suggest the effects of war without the graphic detail, “horror

conveyed without contortion or grimace”.863 In this it seems he

accurately predicted the response, Virginia Woolf approvingly

writing that with Gassed Sargent had “at last pricked some nerve of

protest, or perhaps of humanity”.864 In the light of the more abrasive

858 Unidentified press cutting, 29 March 1919, IWM: ART/WAI/312, ART DOC 1. 859 Malvern, 2004: 106. 860 Malvern, 2004: 106. 861 An example perhaps of what Sickert had termed “Sargentolatry” cited in Harrison, 1994: 30. 862 Memo, 11 June 1918, IWM: ART/WAI/312.ART Doc 1 (JSS correspondence). 863 The Athenaeum, 27 April, 1901: 537; Kim, 2012: 147. 864 Virginia Woolf writing in The Fleeting Portrait, cited in Das, 2008:3; Bird also cites instances of similar reactions including the account in the Daily News of 10 September, 1920 of a young girl who fainted before the painting, Bird, 1980: 48. The universal praise received by Sargent for this painting was tempered only by Konody’s observation that the men appeared “as though they were returning from a picnic” which he found “singularly unconvincing”. However he retracted this

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works of Nash, Nevinson, Lewis and Roberts, this may seem an

unexpected comment, but serves to reinforce the views expressed by

the Graphic in their article lending their approval to a more

traditional approach in the battle of the war artists.

Bird draws attention to the different treatment accorded Gassed to

that suffered by Nevinson’s The Harvest of Battle (fig.83), both

paintings “lauded for their ‘realism’”.865 While both had been

officially commissioned for the projected Hall of Remembrance, it

was Sargent’s painting which was exhibited in the Royal Academy’s

1919 Summer Exhibition; Nevinson’s was excluded, much against

the artist’s wishes. Yockney wrote in response to Nevinson’s

complaint that there “were reasons of state for this exception to the

rule”.866 These reasons were not amplified. Sargent, it would seem,

was receiving special treatment at the expense of his fellow war

artists, and I should like to suggest that along with his celebrity

status, this owed much to the committee’s attempt to offer the public

the more acceptable face of war at a time when sections of the press

were condemning the collection for failing to portray “the crowning

victories of our forces, their heroism and endurance”.867

Butler, by contrast, did not avoid “the terrible havoc of war”, as she

offered her own interpretation of the horror of battle and its

consequences.868 As contemporary reviews of the Roll Call

demonstrate, Butler made “no attempt to gloss over stern realities to

make a pretty picture”, for her representation of the aftermath of war

was described as “almost too painful in its reality”, and we see in her

work the ravages of conflict etched on the faces and bodies of the

comment following a letter from a serving officer in the Observer, cited in Bird, 1980: 51. 865 Bird, 1980: 42-49; Bird comments that this highlights the elasticity of the term ‘realism’. 866 Cited in Bird, 1980: 43. 867 Reginald Grundy in the Connoisseur, cited in Bird, 1980: 45. 868 ILN, 9 May 1874.

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soldiers.869 Bird argues that the values and beliefs current in pre-

1914 society were governed by a “dominant ideological discourse”

which limited opposition and a climate “resistant to the construction

of an alternative signifying practice” within representations of

war.870 I suggest that this is too restrictive and does not take into

account Butler’s novel approach to her art. I do not go so far as to

infer that she was able to convey accurately the total experience of

war. For someone who had never participated in a battle, that would

be virtually impossible as Keegan has testified. Rather, I argue that

her work significantly altered how both artists and public regarded

the psychological and physical effects of war in a way which

continues to resonate. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century

Butler was complimented for her truthfulness and, her paintings were

deemed “an eloquent argument for peace” and as late as 1905,

Holman Hunt was writing that the Roll Call “touched the nation’s

heart as few pictures have ever done”.871 Both Butler and Sargent

enjoyed immense popularity in their time; Sargent’s popularity,

though, has proved far the more enduring, with Gassed representing

one of the seminal works of the First World War, and still well-

known into the twenty-first century.872 Given Butler’s unflinching

approach to war and its effects upon the ranks, the question now is

why her painting is no longer similarly appreciated. One possible

explanation is that Butler’s subject-matter was already dated by the

first decades of the twentieth century and enthusiasm for her as a

new young, female, talent had long passed. More likely, though, is

the fact that Sargent’s painting was heralded as the masterpiece of

the First World War and held centre stage at a new gallery in a

specially constructed museum, while the Roll Call remained in

private, if royal, hands, deprived of the ‘oxygen of publicity’. The

869 Morning Post 7 May 1874, ILN, 9 May 1874. 870 Bird, 1980: 42. 871 Catholic News, 24 June 1893; Hunt, cited in Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 36. 872 For example it was reported that she “is so much the rage just now that it is well-nigh treason to speak of her works otherwise than in terms of highest eulogy”, the Hour, 15 March 1875.

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occasional showing of the painting as part of an exhibition up to

1912 did little to remedy this situation.873

Regardless of this eclipse, does the Roll Call show that Butler had

anything to contribute to modernity in this new era and beyond?

How do we assess her legacy? In his discussion of the inter-

relationship between modernism and modernity in Britain, Peters

Corbett argues that in the first part of the twentieth century all artistic

styles are concerned with modernity; formal modernism in his

analysis is too narrow a definition and even “non-modernist works”

are part of this dialogue, opening up the debate to a consideration of

the relevance and even influence of the more traditional artist.874

Furthermore, modernism itself was multi-faceted, a “heterogeneous

response to a shared experience”, and inherently unstable and wide-

ranging, while Williams suggests the pursuit of an “alternative

tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin”.875

It is firmly within these wide margins that I suggest Butler and her

contemporaries are now situated.

In the same way that French art was said to have influenced British

battle painting, it was believed by many that modernity had been the

province of French and French-influenced artists, with British artists

trailing dismally behind. Harrison writes in 1981 that there was “no

English contribution to this movement which a foreign observer

would have regarded as central”.876 On the contrary, Peters Corbett

suggests, in one form or another, British painting formed part of the

genesis of modernity as far back as the middle of the nineteenth

century as it strove to relate art more closely to “lived experience”, a 873 It was not until 1987 that there was a comprehensive exhibition of her works, and it does not appear that the Roll Call was exhibited at all between 1912 and 1987, though I understand that Butler’s Remnants of the Army is to be on display at Tate Britain in November 2015 as part of a forthcoming exhibition on Britain’s Artists and Empire. 874 Peters Corbett, 1997: 14. He is followed in this view by Tickner, 2000: 190 (f/n 33), though she departs from him in referring to British, rather than English art, Tickner, 2000: 192 (f/n 49). 875 Tickner, 2000: 184; Williams, 1989a: 35. 876 Tickner, 2000: 192, citing Harrison.

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movement within which the traditionalists were also capable of

influence.877 Butler was clearly not without her followers, both

within the more restricted world of late-Victorian battle artists, and

in the work of those who comfortably straddled the Victorian and

Edwardian worlds, into and beyond the First World War. Her ability

to delve into the social conscience of the British nation in her

representation of the pain and suffering experienced by the army was

unique in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and anticipated

Konody by more than forty years. Further, Butler was able to portray

the ordinary soldier in a matter of fact way which spoke to an

individual heroism unmatched in Sargent’s more celebrated Gassed,

and I suggest her contribution to modernism is supported by this

sympathetic focus on the rank and file. Drawing on the French

military painters for inspiration, she nevertheless managed to portray

“military life from a thoroughly English” point of view, introducing

a new and vigorous element into British battle painting and one

which did not flinch “from exposing the real loathsomeness of

war”.878 At the same time, she injected a vitality that is exemplified

in the fluidity and format of the Roll Call, and which is both

innovative and powerful. Nor did Butler neglect the mundane

realities of actual engagement. In 1915, the critic of the Connoisseur,

echoing Ruskin’s criticism of Millais’s News from Home (1856-57)

(The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), wrote that “[i]n far too many

of the pictures, the artists fail to remember that a hard fought battle

cannot fail to leave its traces on the clothes and persons of the

combatants”.879 Looking at Balaclava, with its bloodied survivors

and the dishevelled guards of the Roll Call, it is evident that this was

a message Butler understood. It is less easy to say the same of

Sargent’s pristine procession.

877 Peters Corbett, 2004: 5-8; Tickner confirms this in her view that Modernism is “a range of cultural practices”. Tickner, 2000: 184.

878 Cited in Tickner, 2000: 186; ILN, 29 April 1876. 879 The Connoisseur, August 1915: 245; for Ruskin’s comment, see Harrington,

1993: 154.

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CONCLUSION Lady Butler’s painting, The Remnants of an Army, showing assistant surgeon, William Brydon, his skull shattered by an Afghan sword, his pony near death, apparently the only survivor of a terrible massacre, stumbling towards safety is one of the best known of all Victorian images.880

A Question of Legacy

Notwithstanding her apparent neglect in the opening decades of the

twentieth century, Butler’s work continues to appeal to writers,

historians (but not art historians) and military personnel, often, but

not exclusively, when considering illustrations for their own works

on the late nineteenth century. In 1993, in her essay on women

artists, Beryl Bainbridge was describing Butler’s Inkerman as

“extremely realistic and superbly grouped” with “none of the static

quality of a photograph” and “as full of movement as the chorus line

in ballet”, in a neat reversal of Nevinson’s belief that it was

photography that would force painting to be dynamic.881 Bainbridge

was even more appreciative of The Remnants of an Army, whose

“mood” she found “faultless”, writing that “I soon found I could

sway my way to Jellalabad on a dying nag”, praising the way that

“the meandering stagger of the wretched beast echoes the curve of

the dusty track to safety”.882 This same image of Dr Brydon making

his solitary way to Jellalabad from Kabul is used by William

Darymple in his acclaimed Return of the King: the Battle for

Afghanistan, with the caption “Lady Butler’s famous oil”, which he

describes, along with Wollen’s The Last Stand of the 44th at

Gundamuck, 1842 (fig.84) as “one of the era’s most famous

images”.883 Similarly, Peter Hopkirk describes how Dr Brydon

880 The Times, 8 February 2014-Huon Mallalieu ‘Family Archive Offers Insight into Campaign Disasters’. 881 Bainbridge, 1993: 2; Haycock, 2013: 88; Nevinson conversely writes in his autobiography that “[p]hotographic art had never appealed” to him, Nevinson, 1937: 43. 882 Bainbridge, 1993: 5. 883 Darymple, 2014: 489, the illustration is shown between 376 and 377; he also uses the outline of Butler’s Dr. Brydon on his horse as illustration for chapter eight, The Wail of Bugles, Dalrymple, 2014: 355.

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became “the subject of one of the most celebrated paintings of

Victorian times-Lady Butler’s Remnants of an Army”, hinting at an

almost symbiotic relationship between subject and painter in the

nineteenth-century public mind.884 The military historian, Richard

Holmes, chose probably her best known image, Scotland Forever!

for the cover of his 2001 publication, Redcoat: The British Soldier in

the Age of Horse and Musket.885 It is this image, too, which was used

as German propaganda with suitably altered uniforms and headgear

during the First World War, and anecdotally, is widely recognised,

even if not always attributed. In the run-up to the bi-centenary of

Waterloo a review of new histories of the battle in the Guardian

(fig.85) featured an untitled, unattributed image from Quatre Bras.886

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria’s

daughter, Princess Louise, having ready access to the original, is

known to have painted a copy of the Roll Call in oil.887 Even one of

Butler’s more unpopular paintings, Evicted, has not been overlooked,

and was used by Cecil Woodham-Smith for the dust-cover of his

book The Great Famine: Ireland 1845-9, a tribute of which both

Butler and her husband would have been proud.888

It is clear that Butler enjoyed considerable success in the nineteenth

century in both academic circles and with the general public. As the

century drew to an end, prints of her works were still widespread

notwithstanding her declining profile and near exclusion from art

historical consideration. The National Army Museum catalogue, for

example, endorses her one-time cultural capital by holding records of 884 Hopkirk, 2006: 268 who does not mention Wollen by name and the painting of Gundamuck is reproduced between pages 294 and 295 without attribution. 885 A photo-engraving of this painting was regarded by a friend of Butler’s second son as “one of his most treasured possessions”, DA. Correspondence, Edmund O’Connor to Dom Urban Butler on 14 March 1932: 1164, (uncatalogued). 886 John Pemble in the Guardian, 29 November 2014 under the heading As its Bicentenary Approaches, a Bloody Battle and its Consequences are Newly Appraised. 887 Meynell, 1898: 7; Patrick Comerford chose Balaclava for his’ Art for Lent’ talk in the Radio 4 series broadcast on 15 March 2014 as this “portrays in a blunt way the horrors and sufferings of war and the plight of the common soldier on the front line”. 888 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 95.

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reproductions of the Roll Call and Scotland Forever! in 1882, Quatre

Bras and Tel el Kebir in 1888, Steady, the Drums and Fifes! in 1897

and Floreat Etona! and Halt on a Forced March in 1898.889 The Roll

Call lithograph and Quatre Bras line engraving by Richard Josey

after Butler were both produced by the Fine Art Society, even after

the severance of the relationship between artist and gallery in

1881.890 Into the twentieth century reproductions remained buoyant

with Inkerman in 1909, Listed for the Connaught Rangers, 1911,

Eyes Right in 1916, the Dorset Yeomanry at Agagia in 1917, and

Scotland Forever! in 1980.891 Butler herself records seeing a copy of

the Roll Call in Funchal, Madeira in 1899 on her way to the Cape.892

When the National Army Museum mounted an exhibition to coincide

with the staging of Michael Morpurgo’s Warhorse in 2012, it was

Butler’s drawings of horses which were chosen for display.893 As

Usherwood and Spencer-Smith have observed “there is no doubt that

Butler’s reputation and popularity were enhanced by the widespread

sale of reproductions of her work”, which along with her carte-de-

visites with the sub-title “Painter of the “Roll Call”, kept her name

and image in the public eye, a popular enhancement which ironically

may well have damaged her legacy in the longer term.894

Butler was not alone in this seriality of her works. Her

contemporaries, too, are well represented in the National Army

889 NAM: 5602-497-479; NAM: 5602-420; NAM: Artists Catalogue under Butler, unreferenced; NAM: 7209-2; NAM: 5602-421; NAM: Bks, 25411. 890 The Fine Art Society had sued Butler over her painting Scotland Forever! as it considered that she had broken an agreement either in relation to its showing or reproduction, Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 43, citing the Fine Art Society MS Minute Book, 12 March 1881. (This appears to now be lost or destroyed). Butler refers to this rupture obliquely in her autobiography “[t]here was a law suit in question and there let the matter rest”, Butler, 1993: 151. Nevertheless, it has been noted that the Fine Art Society, which gained its financial security through handling Butler’s works insisted in 1877 that she refrain from exhibiting at the Royal Academy for two years, Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 41, 43. 891 NAM: 7407-89-2; NAM: 6409-25; NAM: 7406-24; NAM: 7406-13; NAM: 8207-39; Holly Leaves also reproduced Balaclava on 25 November, 1911. 892 Butler, 1909: 96. 893 Personal observation. 894 Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 1987: 41; Butler writes how one of her aunts “passing along a street in Chelsea, was astonished to see her niece on a costermonger’s barrow amongst some bananas!” Butler, 1993: 92.

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Museum, with numerous reproductions of works by Charlton, Crofts,

Giles, Wollen and Woodville throughout the second half of the

nineteenth century and into the second decade of the twentieth, in

what Perry has referred to as a “repetitive visual image”.895 Several

are taken from newspaper illustrations, others were distributed

through art galleries, printsellers and book publications.896 In the

twenty-first century reproductions of the works of all these artists

continue to be available on the internet through specialist fine art

suppliers. Regimental museums and regional galleries holding their

paintings display them with pride and affection, though they are

singularly absent or removed from show in major London galleries,

particularly the national art galleries, the Tate currently holding four

paintings by Woodville and one by Butler in store.897 Butler’s Within

Sound of the Guns adorns the office of the Commandant at the Army

Staff College, Shrivenham, who was keen to have further

information on the painting, while Woodville’s painting All That was

Left of Them is equally well thought of in its home in the Queens

Own Lancers and Yeomanry Museum, Nottinghamshire. Butler’s

The London Irish at Loos is displayed prominently in the tiny

regimental museum in Camberwell above the very football

featured.898 In 2013, Listed for the Connaught Rangers (1878) (Bury

Art Gallery) journeyed from Bury to China for a twelve month

exhibition tour, Toward Modernity: Three Centuries of British Art,

organised in partnership with the Greater Manchester Museums

895 Lara Perry is using this term in respect of cartes de visites, but her argument in respect of the seriality of these likenesses is equally apposite here, Perry, 2012: 730. 896 See NAM: Artists Catalogue under individual names. 897 Woodville’s General Wolfe Climbing the Heights of Abraham on the Morning of the Battle of at Quebec, Poniatowski’s Last Charge, Napoleon Crossing the Bridge at Lobau and Marshal Ney at the Battle of Eylau are all in store at Tate Britain, and Butler’s self-portrait at the National Portrait Gallery; The Remnants of the Army has been either in store at the Tate or on show in a provincial museum for the past decade, though it is due to be exhibited at Tate Britain in November 2015. None of these artists is represented in the National Gallery. 898 I am told by Captain Nigel Wilkinson that when he joined the London Irish Rifles in 1955 there was a flourishing museum and this painting was “in pride of place over the fireplace in the Officer’s Mess”. He continues, that he does not “know why such an important work should be overlooked when the Accession Books were compiled”.

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Group, signalling the curators’ positioning of Butler’s work within a

narrative of artistic modernity. On its return this painting featured on

the cover of the art museum’s booklet in Bury. Exceptionally, The

Last Stand of the 44th at Gundamuck, 1842 by Wollen and Butler’s

The Remnants of an Army are to be included in a national exhibition

at Tate Britain entitled Artists and Empire from November 2015.899

So, why, with all these indications of longevity, were Butler and her

contemporaries losing popularity towards the end of the nineteenth

century and into the twentieth and twenty-first? Why is it that artists

such as Wollen and Woodville, who helped to shape and record a

contemporary British view of imperial endeavour, have been so

marginalised? How could an artist hailed by Punch as “R.A.- ie

‘Really Admirable’”, and “Art’s Joan of Arc” in 1879, and an artist,

described by Usherwood and Spencer-Smith as winning “a

popularity and critical success which no other British woman painter

has ever approached”, disappear from the wider public awareness so

completely within a few short decades?900 How is it that Joanna

Kerton, a twenty-first century artist could exclaim of the only female

artist to be collected by Henry Tate, “[t]he woman who once outsold

Rembrandt and you keep her in storage”.901

On her death in 1933, The Times obituary recorded that Butler had

“led the revival of modern military painting in England” while

acknowledging that her death “awakened but a passing thrill in the

art world of today”.902 Was this less than enthusiastic assessment of

899 Information received from Ian Hook, Keeper of the Essex Regiment Museum. 900 Punch, 24 May 1879: 229, commenting on the exhibition of The Remnants of the Army at the Royal Academy; 1879 was also the year of her unsuccessful bid for election to the Royal Academy; Usherwood and Spencer-.Smith, 1987: back cover; Ellen Clayton dedicates her 1876 work English Female Artists to Butler “in testimony of admiration for her genius”, Clayton, 1876: frontispiece [u/p]; see also Usherwood, 2004: 131. 901 Broadcast as part of the series, The Story of Women and Art by Amanda Vickery on BBC 2, 23 May 2014; Butler wrote that she rejoiced “to know that [her] best works are nearly all in public galleries or in the keeping of [her] Sovereign”, Butler, 1909: 142. 902 The Times, 3 October 1933.

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her career because she was not allied to any particular group of

artists? Was it on account of her immense popular appeal,

approaching stardom, enhanced by the unnerving collision of

femininity and war, or perhaps because she was dismissed – along

with her contemporaries – as part of that stale tradition of academic

artists increasingly side-lined at the beginning of the twentieth

century, and without an acknowledgment of her continuing

influence?903 Is it, in fact, a function of military painting to be

overlooked in a nation obsessed with the idea that it is peace-loving,

unless such art fulfils another explicit function, such as the

portraiture of significant personnel or the recording of traumatic

events still within the collective public memory? The centenary

events around Britain in the years 2014-18 are testament to the

nation’s urge to commemorate the First World War in a manner not

accorded the Crimean War, the Boer War, or even Waterloo, in spite

of the forthcoming bi-centenary. How far can this be accounted for

by the increasing experience in the twentieth century of a

mechanised and industrialised warfare? Did this experience bring

with it the aesthetic failure of military painting – and of realist

military painting in particular – which could fully meet these new

conditions of war?

At the time of Butler’s one and only retrospective in 1987, held at the

National Army Museum, exhibiting many works never before seen in

public, John Russell Taylor felt that her “relative neglect” was likely

to be a function of Butler’s gender, while acknowledging a distinct

distancing by the feminist movement “largely because of some

obscure feeling that she was not really a woman artist, but chose, in

her subject matter and attitudes to play on the wrong side”.904 By

electing to paint military scenes, using her “masculine forcefulness”

and single-mindedness, it is said, Butler had eschewed her more 903 Wilfred Meynell noted in 1898 that the “mere fact that the painter was not a man, but that her subject was the soldier, touched the popular heart: so unexpected in English art was the association of the soldier and the woman”, Meynell: 1898: 6. 904 The Times, 2 June 1987; the exhibition also travelled to Leeds Art Gallery.

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feminine sensibilities in order to succeed in a male dominated art

world and presented as an honorary male, even though it was her

gender which finally prevented her from becoming a Royal

Academician in the 1879 election.905 Taylor found this attitude to be

unfair, as it failed to identify that many of her best works are

“depictions of disastrous aftermaths to heroic but wrong-headed

engagements”.906 Her emphasis on the emotional and physical

suffering behind a militaristic front seems to have been overlooked,

and calls into question larger issues around the politics of gender,

taste and inclusion. Although her large canvases of the field of battle

have been classified as history painting, Butler never really fitted

squarely within this category. She never, for example, chose

mythological scenes or scenes from distant history as did Crofts, and

rarely chose biblical scenes but rather, used a military setting for her

humanitarian approach, subtly changing the direction of military

painting as she did so, pushing at the boundaries of empathy.907

Although Shaw has pointed to the way Turner’s The Field of

Waterloo subverted eighteenth-century military art in its

“unflinching portrayal of the aftermath of war in all its ghastliness”,

in “stark contrast to the glorification of heroes”, this relates more to

the novel inclusion of women seen among a mass of male bodies on

the field of battle rather than Butler’s intense focus on individual

male suffering.908 Whereas Turner represents horror in the

indiscriminate piling up of the dead and injured, Butler presents the

viewer with a close-up of their injuries, both physical and

psychological.

905 Harris and Nochlin, 1976: 53; Nunn, 1995: 65 records that members were defined as “men of fair moral character”. 906 The Times, 2 June 1987; Marina Vaizey writing in the Sunday Times on 17 May 1987 called the exhibition “sensational”, in spite of the absence of follow-up. 907 It was not always necessary, however, to take subjects from the distant historical past to qualify as a history painting as demonstrated by West in his Death of General Wolfe eleven years after the event, Morris, 2005: 7-9; Butler did paint the occasional religious picture, for example, The Magnificat, her first entry to the Royal Academy, which was rejected. 908 Shaw, 2013: 35; caption for the painting on display at Tate Britain, January 2015.

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As Patrizia Di Bello has commented, recent “scholarship has not

been particularly enthusiastic” about Butler’s paintings, whilst

Markovits reflects on “[h]ow slight a cultural footprint” the Roll Call

seems to have left behind, in spite of its celebrity status for a full

quarter century.909 William Feaver, who first encountered Butler in

The Wonder Book of Empire, writes that she had “lost her touch” by

the time she and her husband retired to Ireland in 1905, commenting

that others such as Crofts had overtaken her “in terms of historicity,

while younger generations had more advanced ideas of realism”.910

In her analysis of the work of women artists, Pamela Gerrish Nunn

suggests that Butler’s decline in popularity “emphasises the public

acceptance of a more traditionally feminine style”, by which she

infers, more domestic, commenting that Butler’s “bourgeois realism”

was not as fashionable, while Di Bello notes that her paintings

“revelling in the spectacle of male bodies and painted in an

unstinting realism rooted in academic training do not fit well in

modernist art histories”.911 Conversely, Nochlin, having bypassed

Butler completely in her book Women, Art and Power, together with

Ann Harris in Women Artists, 1550-1950, curiously refers to her

“popular notoriety”, arguing that she was “one of those striking

anomalies among nineteenth-century women artists, a woman for

whom being female was in many ways an advantage”.912

In their different articulations, Taylor, Markovits, Feaver, Nunn, Di

Bello, Harris and Nochlin highlight the contradictions surrounding

Butler’s legacy. Given her chosen genre, she had placed herself

outside the tradition of nineteenth-century women artists, showing

none of “woman’s weakness”, yet at the same time, brought to her

art a more feminine sensibility of suffering.913 Nor was it was simply

909 Di Bello, 2011: 242; Markovits, 2009: 212. 910 William Feaver, reviewing Butler’s 1987 retrospective in the Observer, May 1987, HHG, T.E.Weller’s scrapbook: 109. 911 Nunn, 1987: 220; Di Bello, 2011: 242. 912 Harris and Nochlin, 1976: 53, 58; Butler’s year of birth is given incorrectly as 1850. She was born in 1846. 913 The Times, 2 May 1874.

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her gender which led to such differing assessments, but rather, I

suggest, her perceived and problematic popularity alongside her

individuality as a painter, pursuing her “authentically autonomous

projects”.914 As Martin Myrone has recently examined in relation to

the work of John Martin (1789-1854), such a meteoric rise as he and

Butler enjoyed could lead to critical dismissal alongside charges of

blatant crowd-pleasing.915 In Butler’s case this was complicated by

the initial positive reaction to her gender and choice of subject-matter

by the critics, tempered by warnings that her success was likely to be

short-lived.916

Educated with unusual freedom to be independent-minded, Butler

painted in her own style, joining neither the Pre-Raphaelite School,

nor the Impressionists, nor the Post-Impressionists, and certainly not

the more avant-garde, and was difficult to pigeon-hole. It was so

much easier to cast her, along with those contemporaries considered

here, in the role of imperialist, rather than to look at the paintings

themselves for signs of her individualistic approach.917 Although she

was trained in the academic tradition of history painting, and was

influenced by the French style of battle art, her instincts were rather

for innovation; perhaps not so much radical, militant or threatening,

as clear-sighted and expressive; a quiet revolutionary who did not

break with the past, but, rather, moulded it to achieve her own end.918

914 Williams, 1989c: 53. 915 Butler, however, was respected by Ruskin, who referred to her painting Quatre Bras as “Amazon’s work”, whereas he had dismissed Martin’s work as “merely a common manufacture”, Cook and Wedderburn, 1904: 138; Myrone, 2011: 13 citing Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn, 1903-12, vol. 10: 222; interestingly both Martin and Butler exhibited at the popular Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, Martin with his one-man show in 1822 and Butler, in 1881 with Scotland Forever! 916 Art Journal, 1875, vol. xiv: 220, referred to “those who prophesied a speedy collapse the moment she ventured on the exhibition of a second picture”. 917 This approach also ignores the reception of her paintings towards the end of the nineteenth century. 918 Her attitude towards women’s suffrage reflects her ambivalence. Although she did sign a petition in favour in 1897, she avoided what Cherry has termed the feminist “taint of deviancy” and was aghast at her sister’s decision to march in support, as evidenced by her letter to Alice Meynell before the event, Cherry, 2000: 144, 57; HHG. Letter Butler to Alice Meynell, 11 July 1910 (uncatalogued).

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Notwithstanding her continuing reputation amongst military

personnel, however, her perceived and misplaced link with empire as

highlighted by Feaver has, I argue, obscured the way in which a

majority twenty-first century audience receives her visual and still

uncomfortable representations, dismissively placing them firmly

within an establishment tradition.

Bainbridge dismissed the argument that Butler “helped provide the

popular support for the imperial adventures of the military heroes of

the Victorian age” with her forthright exclamation “[w]hat rubbish!”

She denies that Butler was a jingoist, “but simply someone who

could wield a brush and whose childhood imagination had been fired

by war”.919 Here I depart from Bainbridge in suggesting that Butler’s

childhood imagination had been fired by soldiers and horses, rather

than by the act of war itself, which she deliberately avoided wherever

possible. I would further argue that far from supporting the warlike

adventures of the very end of the nineteenth century, Butler was

increasingly marginalised by the more overtly imperialistic images of

her contemporaries which she rejected. One has only to read her

writings in From Sketch-Book and Diary in which she eulogises over

a South African “[f]airyland direct from nature”, which for her was

disrupted by a descending “war cloud” which “burst in blood and fire

[. . .] and deepened the sense of melancholy with which [she would]

ever think of that far-away land”, to sense a profound regret for the

forthcoming conflict.920 Instead it was her contemporaries who took

up the challenge to represent and promote the imperial adventure,

often adapting her formulae in the process and eclipsing Butler’s

more empathetic presentation of the troops. In the aftermath of an

unpopular war they in turn were bypassed in favour of a younger

generation, with no history of its own, willing and able to take on the

challenge of a new and unprecedented technological warfare.

919 Bainbridge, 1993: 6. 920 Butler, 1909: 107, 120.

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What has been overlooked, however, is the lasting, if subtle,

influence of all these earlier artists on this younger generation and

well into the twentieth century. All had moved away from the more

topographical paintings to an emphasis on particular incidents; all

had largely avoided aristocratic portraiture to concentrate more

closely on the common soldier and individual heroism, much in the

same way as, for example, Kennington’s The Kensingtons at

Laventie, “‘one picture of the war’ according to a contemporary

review, which did not espouse sentimentality”, Sargent in Gassed

and Nevinson in A Group of Soldiers (1917) (Imperial War

Museum).921 Malvern’s description of Kennington’s painting refers

to the “obviously serving soldiers” who are “evidently battle-worn”

and where each figure can be identified, and where “[r]ather than

glorifying or romanticising war, it stressed the deprivations” of the

troops.922 In this, it clearly resembled Wollen’s The Last Stand of the

44th and Butler’s Roll Call, in the latter even to the inclusion of a

soldier lying exhausted, injured or dead in the snow, beside his

abandoned weapon.

Well-known Vorticists, too, such as Lewis in A Battery Shelled

(1917) (Imperial War Museum) and Roberts in A Shell Dump (1918-

19) (Imperial War Museum) – both paintings commissioned by the

BWMC – were using figurative, if slightly stylised representations in

their war paintings.923 In his review in the Athenaeum R.H.Wilenski

identified two categories of World War One artists, those tortured by

war, that is to say those who sought active service at the Front, and

the rest.924 Amongst the former he singles out John and Paul Nash,

Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, Lewis and Roberts writing that there is

“no question of their permanent value as records of the effects of the

921 The Times, 20 May 1916, cited in Harrington, 1992: 54; aristocratic portraiture was in fact left largely to Sargent. According to Yockney, the War Office was “horrified” by this painting by Nevinson, as it showed “evidence of British degeneration”, letter to Masterman, 4 December 1917, cited in Black, 2007: 119. 922 Malvern, 2004: 11. 923 Malvern, 2004: 96; both were Uccello-sized memorial project paintings. 924 Athenaeum, 19 December 1919: 1375.

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war” and praising their “intense intellectual and spiritual emotion,

translated into and expressed in terms of pictorial rhythm”.925 I

suggest that it is equally true to say of the works of this late-

Victorian cohort that they too constitute valuable and lasting records

of the effects of war, both contemporary and historic. Looking more

closely at, for example, Balaclava, the Roll Call, Inkerman and

Dawn of Waterloo, it is difficult to escape their “intense intellectual

and spiritual emotion” and their “pictorial rhythm”. Similarly,

Woodville’s All That Was Left of Them and Wollen’s Last Stand of

the 44th represent fully both the heroics and the exhausted

desperation of war. Dalrymple writes evocatively as recently as 2013

of Wollen’s depiction of “a group of ragged but doggedly determined

soldiers on the hilltop of Gandamak (sic) standing encircled behind a

thin line of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in”.926

The criticism voiced that these earlier artists did not personally

observe the action is, I argue, not sufficient reason for ignoring their

work, especially in the light of evidence of photographic assistance

in the works of at least Nevinson, John and Sargent discussed in

chapter five, which could well be equated with the use of “Specials”

in the field. Nor is it reasonable to expect the late-Victorians to paint

conflict as it was in the Great War with all its technological horrors,

hitherto completely unknown. Paul Valéry, writing in 1931, endorses

this view with his statement that from the end of the Edwardian reign

life had changed so radically that we “must expect great innovations

to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic

invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change

in our very notion of art”.927 As Harrington has observed of this

group “[t]heir demise was due wholly to the official war pictures

which did manage to capture the war in all its attendant horrors

created by twentieth-century mechanisation and machinery”.928 925 Athenaeum, 19 December 1919: 1375. 926 Dalrymple, 2014: 489, who uses the alternative spelling of Gandamak. 927 Cited in Benjamin, 1999: 242. 928 Harrington, 1993: 306.

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Nevertheless, their paintings in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries were representative of the effects of – and

contemporary responses to – war as it was then and in some cases,

into the present day. I suggest that these images deserve to be

considered afresh for the messages they seek to convey, messages

which are still relevant and form part of the history of British battle

painting. No-one who has looked at the face of the central survivor

of the Charge of the Light Brigade in Balaclava can doubt that it

shows the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, a phenomenon

unrecognised until well into the twentieth century

What could well be said is that the “old guard” failed to provide a

social commentary on the Boer War as it drew to a close, but this

was a failure largely shared with the general public as they moved

into the twentieth century. Nor did they dwell on issues of race or

gender. Not only did they “seem to lack sympathy with our Empire

battles in which blacks are the foe”, they ignored altogether the

positive contribution of different racial groups within the imperial

army.929 Apart from her self-portrait Butler produced only one

significant painting of a woman in Evicted, and her representation of

Zulus in The Defence of Rorke’s Drift was not repeated, possibly on

account of her difficulties in seeing her models, but more likely

following her husband’s adverse remarks.930 Woodville’s approach

was more complex as he did profile Sudanese warriors, as for

example in The Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, but more

for reasons of colour contrast against the dust of the desert and to

enhance the heroism of the British soldiers in their khaki. Imperial

soldiers from African and Asian racial groups fighting alongside

white British troops are notably absent from his works.931 Although

Woodville did feature Indian ambulance workers in South Africa this 929 Spielmann, 1901:422. 930 She did, however, profile Bengali troops in her 1873 watercolour, 10th Bengal Lancers Tent-Pegging. 931 See, for example, Caught in the Act, a drawing reproduced in With Flag to Pretoria, showing a British soldier interrupting a Boer flogging a semi-naked African strapped to the wheel of a wagon, Wilson, 1902: 762.

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was in a subservient role and in order to highlight bad Boer

behaviour whilst hinting at their disregard of the rights of the native

African and Indian communities said to be upheld by the British.

Where he and his fellow battle-painters depicted Boers this was to

differentiate the moral qualities of the British soldier and the so-

called slovenly habits and deceitful character of their (white)

opponents, both male and female, alongside their abuse of the native

population.932 None of this should negate the validity of the work

that had gone before, for “even the most illiterate could look at a

Woodville or a Lady Butler picture and the forms would be

immediately recognisable” as a portrayal of war, and, mostly, I

suggest, of the damage inflicted in combat.933

It has to be remembered, too, that it was Sargent, the society portrait

painter, rather than Nevinson, the Futurist, who was revered for his

war art both then and now. Moreover, when compared with Sargent,

it is Butler who represented the more searing and empathetic account

of suffering, notwithstanding her reliance on second-hand reportage.

As Benjamin comments, those images of the past which are not

recognised as concerns of the present are vulnerable to extinction,

even though their influence continues, and unless we “actively

inherit the past” we are in danger of selling short the future.934 The

question has to be asked as to why the demand of the British public

for written history and specifically military history of this period is

vibrant when this visual military culture is so marginalised? I am not

suggesting that the World War One official artists did not break new

ground; rather that they did so as part of a continuum of battle

painting, and in a manner which embraced the new style of warfare

to which they were exposed, for as Williams points out “it has

become increasingly necessary to notice how relatively far back the

most important period of modern art now appears to be”.935 It is 932 Race was not an issue addressed by the First World War official artists either. 933 Harrington, 1993: 309. 934 Benjamin cited in Cherry, 2000: 8; Barnes, 2014: 9. 935 Williams, 1989b: 37.

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significant that the BWMC for instance referred to Uccello-size

paintings in their commissions, referencing fifteenth-century Italian

art, whilst failing to acknowledge the contribution of home-grown

battle artists, several of whom were active and willing to contribute

to the war effort.936

Those Neglected Works 937

“The composite experience of all the ages is part of each one of us”938

In his 1987 essay, When was Modernism? Williams addresses the

divisive characteristics of a received view of modernism. He urges a

break out from the “non-historical fixity of post-modernism”, calling

for an alternative tradition in which these “neglected works” can be

reassessed, a phrase into which many of these paintings and artists

fall or are consigned. I argue that these late-Victorian battle painters

are victims of a “selective tradition”, a tradition which in its anxiety

to be progressive, focussed on the new and sometimes marginal

whilst ignoring the work of these artists, for as Ryan reminds us,

“popular modernism and English traditionalism are frequent

bedfellows”.939 At the end of the nineteenth century, Wilfrid Meynell

wrote of his sister-in-law’s work that “Lady Butler has done for the

soldier in Art what Mr Rudyard Kipling has done for him in

Literature-she has taken the individual, separated him, seen him

close, and let the world see him.”940 With her more painterly,

academic technique, Butler may well have eschewed modernism, and

would certainly have dissociated herself from the avant-garde, but

there is little doubt that she embraced modernity in her subject matter

and representation, even if this was a modernity which “never quite

936 Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (1438-40) (National Gallery, London) measures 182cm by 317cm. 937 Williams, 1989a: 35. 938 Walter Pater writing in 1868, cited in Prettejohn, 2012: 2. 939 Ryan, citing Bill Schwarz, 2007: 65. 940 Meynell, 1898: 31.

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seemed able to break free from the imprint” of the past.941 Her

contemporaries within this cohort, specifically Woodville, may not

always have followed her in technique, their styles often being

subject to rapidity of execution, and were closer to a more

impressionistic finish whilst shying away from Butler’s

confrontational portrayal of pain and psychological damage.

Nevertheless, their representations of a soldier’s experiences, within

the context of changing views on empire, did much to expose

modern conditions within the army and society as a whole, and as

Peters Corbett and Perry have indicated, the “formal appearance” of

these works is of less significance than their connections to their

historical and cultural context.942

In this thesis I have argued that the works of these artists not only

represented contemporary values but, further, laid down markers for

their successors in form, both academic and popular, and content.

The fact that these markers are rarely now acknowledged should not

diminish their value either for a modern audience or the art historian

in researching this period. Writing of the politics of the avant-garde,

Williams stresses the need to look behind a particular genre to “the

turbulent succession of artistic movements and cultural formations

which compose the real history of Modernism”.943 In other words,

we should not be seduced by the outward appearance of innovation

and iconoclasm, but instead assess each individual or group on its

own merit, considering their respective innovative practices and

ideas, as it is only then that we can judge their value. Along with

Tickner, I argue for a fresh look at the canon of modernist works

through which to view, or review, these paintings for there is “more

than one kind of modernism (and modernity) at stake”.944

941 Schwarz, 1987: 147. 942 Peters Corbett and Perry, 2000: 2. 943 Williams 1989c: 50. 944 Tickner, 2000: 184.

256

Battle art, as a genre, presents as a complex conundrum when

considering its place within modernity. Nor is it securely situated

within the genre of history painting, but crosses the boundaries

between popular and academic art. Not only is the outward

appearance of the paintings traditional (though as I have argued this

should not of itself exclude such works of art from modernity), but

the subject-matter, too, is inherently traditional and firmly rooted

within the establishment whilst, perversely, it is also perceived to be

“un-British”. With the onset of the First World War, cavalry

engagements common in nineteenth-century battles were virtually

obsolete and associated with imperialism, leading to the dismissal of

many of those paintings in which they were represented, along with

their artists. Whilst this may have been understandable in the

turbulent first part of the twentieth century, I would argue that with

the passage of time it would now be appropriate to address more

fully the contribution of these battle paintings and painters within the

wider history and development of modernity. Comparisons between

works in the late nineteenth century and those commissioned in

World War One have already been drawn here. Much twenty-first

century battle art similarly privileges the figurative, as opposed to an

emphasis on technological warfare, indicating the part of these late-

nineteenth-century artists within a continuing tradition. I suggest that

there is more research to be done in terms of the place of this cohort

in both popular and academic art, in particular given the ambivalent

attitude of the British towards military painting generally, as

evidenced by the many such works of art currently in store. Given

the increase of war art exhibited in the Royal Academy at the end of

the nineteenth century, at what point precisely did their

representations of warfare cease to be meaningful to the British

public? Was it a gradual process of attrition, or did it occur as the

result of a particular event, such as the unpopular ending to the Boer

War?

257

As indicated in the introduction, I have used Butler as a connecting

thread throughout, not to profile her work exclusively, but rather as a

case study when considering that of her contemporaries about whom

far less is known and, in spite of their popularity in the nineteenth

century, little studied.945 I would argue that more research into the

work of all these artists is needed, their techniques, the influence of

their work for the illustrated press, their networks and their legacies

and in Butler’s case, her place within a feminist art history.

Woodville in particular was well regarded by his fellow artists and in

much demand by the illustrated press until the first decade of the

twentieth century, whilst Crofts was recognised by the Royal

Academy. While Butler and her battle art contemporaries may well

be representative of their time, this does not mean their work does

not transcend the boundaries of the nineteenth century in their focus

on the common soldier, his heroism, his courage and his suffering, a

focus which continues to be highlighted in war art and photography

well into the twenty-first century. This is an emphasis which was

undoubtedly new in the second half of the nineteenth century and it

may not be going too far to suggest that the all-embracing policy of

the Imperial, now Commonwealth, War Graves Commission, of

equality in death grew out of this novel appreciation of the rank and

file as individuals worthy of celebration.946

945 Apart from Butler and the 1917 local exhibition of Charlton’s works, I am not aware of any retrospective of any of these artists. 946 It may be no coincidence that it was William Burdett-Coutts who had reported on the war in South Africa for The Times who delivered the deciding speech in the House of Commons debating the form of secular and universal headstone in British military cemeteries.

258

ABBREVIATIONS

BTHAG-Beverley Treasure House and Art Gallery

BL-British Library

BWMC-British War Memorials Committee

DA-Downside Abbey (Dom Urban papers)

FAS-Fine Art Society

HHG-Humphrey’s Homestead, Greatham, Sussex (Meynell

archives)

ILN-Illustrated London News

IWM-Imperial War Museum

LAG-Leeds City Art Gallery

NAM-National Army Museum Archives

NMM-National Media Museum, Bradford

RAA-Royal Academy Archives

RC-Royal Collection

RCWSA-Royal Commission on the War in South Africa

BTH-Treasure House, Beverley (Stewart Papers/Strickland

Constable Papers)

259

VAM-Victoria and Albert Museum-National Art Library

WAG-Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

YMT-York Museums Trust

260

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